Friday 30 April 2010

Science

It is wonderful. It brought us out of the dark ages, sanitised our minds, freed us from hocus-pocus, witches, black magic and all those nightmares that live like maggots in the half light. How did it do it? It did it simply by not believing in the unprovable. Science is therefore directly responsible for cleaning the sheets of our minds and making us nearly pure. A good scientist is what a priest should be: honest, diligent and a searcher-after-truth. How like religion science is! Psychologists are our confessors, social workers our parish priests, physicists our cosmogenists - and all trained in what we call different branches of science.

But let us be careful: you can't arrive at the truth without someone wanting to own it and then make a living out of it. This of course is what happened to Christianity: the great accumulated wealth of the Church and the self-indulgence that followed, brought about the Reformation and gave Luther and Henry VIII (amongst others) something to complain about.

Who then are the Saints of Science? They are the independent workers who stand firm in the presence of the scientific industries (which only want to endorse research that leads to profit). They are the great men and women who manage to keep their physical bodies intact while pursuing an unbiased search for truth.

Is there any way in which Science is an unsatisfying religion? It can satisfy our need to advance towards truth, to find meaning in our lives, to investigate the origins of the world and of the universe, to heal our spiritual malaise, to hand out healing and mind-enhancing drugs, to unite like-minded truth-seekers in social fraternities. What then, can't it do?

There is one place where it might fall a little short. Science, in demanding that experiments must be repeatable, is not very good with one-offs. A lot of our most crucial experiences consist of one-offs.

Secondly, science tends to regard 'outside' as more real than 'inside'. In other words, the visible universe is the bedrock of science and generally considered more 'real' than we are ourselves. So something we glean from electrodes in our brain is considered much more reliable knowledge than something we actually experience directly for ourselves.

It goes without saying that from a scientific point of view when we die, we stop and the world continues, whereas if we put a lot of store by our own consciousness we might well believe that the world stops and we continue; or at least, in the spirit of mature compromise, that both we and the world continue.

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