Science and Religion

One of the things I like about science is that you can show adults and children alike that it works, how it works and even tell them to go and try it out, and they can see for themselves that it works. A simple experiment to get fresh water from salt water is triflingly easy to set up and execute. There's no requirement to tell a child that they need 'faith' to understand it, they can see it happen right before their eyes. 

Of course not every scientific experiment is that easy to execute or to understand. People can't walk off the street into a research lab and get up to speed with the goings on in a matter of minutes. The great thing, though, is that the principle is the same. Show someone your conclusion and your methodology for reaching that conclusion and (given the access to the right equipment and expertise) they can replicate what you did and, if the experiment is sound, they should reach the same conclusion. 

This is true whether the experiment is being done for the first time, or the ten millionth time. If someone wants to know the chemical make-up of water it's not dependent upon where they are in the earth's geography or when they are in the earth's timeline. Anyone anywhere can discover that water is H₂0. (providing there is water available, of course). God doesn't share this consistency. 

Conversely if we lost all the world's knowledge, all our written words, and language, and had to start from scratch, the story of the talking snake, as Sam Harris points out, is gone for good. There's also no more great flood, no more man rising from the dead. No more Torah, Qu'ran or New Testament. We'd again work out how to build buildings so tall that they appear to almost scrape the sky, but the myth about Muhammad splitting the moon in two will never be heard again. In fact nothing about Muhammad, Moses, Cain, Able, Jesus, Thor, Zeus, or God would ever be heard again. As with Stephen King's Dark Tower, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, or Jo Rowling's Harry Potter, the stories about god cannot survive a colossal wiping out of human knowledge. 

Science, though, is different. Visible light would still be made up of a spectrum of colour and you can be assured that someone will split this spectrum. You can be assured that someone will even rediscover that there's 'light' beyond the red that we can see. People will again work out how to harness, produce, and utilise electricity. Someone will test the idea that the world is flat, and discover it isn't. However, no one will again eat a wafer thinking it's the actual flesh of someone who died millennia previously. 

Sure, before we get to all these amazing discoveries we'd again go through a phase of gods, and goddesses. We'd be primitive again. No one invents gods and religions like primitive people. Pretty much no one else invents them at all. Even the relatively recent attempt by Joseph Smith to create a new religion commandeered a god already in use. 

We'd likely again think a volcano was an angry god, but lets hope no one suggests that throwing a virgin in will appease it. We may well think that lightning was a god striking at us from above, though you can be confident this 'god' wouldn't be called Thor. 

We may see crazy potions along the lines of Eye of newt, and toe of frog, being mixed up and fed to people to cure any kind of ailment. This could lead to witches being burnt at the stake because they can do 'magic'. 

These accusations and claims will continue until some day, someone asks the important question - how do you know? 

Then you test the eye of newt recipe and find that it, in fact, doesn't work. However, you test aspirin, and find that it does. Someone might again see an apple fall from a tree, or perhaps it's a coconut this time, or perhaps they simply trip and fall down and they'll question it and wonder why they didn't just float away. It'll be a world where someone can still see an equal an opposite reaction, write about it, and have someone else check it. The radio waves, microwaves, and x-rays will still be here, waiting to be rediscovered by enquiring minds. With no Abraham, there will be no Abrahamic religions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would all be forgotten forever, replaced, probably by other religions, praying to other gods that people make up. Because that's why there are so many different religion - people make them up. The Hindus in India may still well honour a god with an Elephant's head, but it won't be Ganesh. 

Given the choice between living in a world that has religion but not science, and world that has science, but no religion, I know which I'd choose. 

You see, when it comes to truth, religion is a substitute. It's the making up of answers for things you don't know. It's saying 'this is how it is' without checking that you're right. You can look all you want, but religion won't validate truth.

Science though, science is different. The practice of science is the pursuit of truth. You don't have to make it up, you just have to go looking.