For centuries, it looked as if religion tried to tell us facts about the world and just
got things a bit wrong:for example, how old the earth was it claimed 4,000 years old,
or how many suns there were in the universe, it claimed (one).
But in reality, religion was never really interested in doing the sort of things science
does. It might have thrown off the odd theory but at heart it cared about a mission altogether
different: it wanted to tell us stories to make life feel more bearable. It was interested
in giving us something to hold on to that could help us to make it through to the next
day.
At the same time, science - properly viewed - has never been the enemy of spiritual enrichment.
It can yield ideas every bit as consoling and inspiring, as those found in religion.
*bubble transfers between pastor and scientist*. We can usefully look to science for the sort
of ideas we used to seek in religion. Here are four big consoling ideas that can be found
in science:
I: Perspective - The Scale of the Universe
We are at permanent risk - in the conditions of modern life - of losing perspective, that
is of making more of our troubles and fears than is good for us. One of the great benefits
of science is that it helps us to feel small! Science teaches us that our galaxy, the Milky
Way, has approximately 100 billion stars in it, that there are 10 billion galaxies in
the observable universe, each of which contains an average of 100 billion stars, which means
that there are around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (a billion trillion) stars out there. *do
math 10 billion + 10 billion* When we lose perspective, as we invariably
do in the course of pretty much every day in the frenetic city, we should spend a few
moments with a photograph from the Hubble telescope and remember that we are - in a
glorious and redemptive way - what we always feared: nothing.
II: All is Vanity - The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Many of our efforts are designed to perpetuate ourselves in time. We strive to live on through
our work - and to make something more enduring than our biological selves. To release us
from this exhausting and vainglorious folly, religions used to kindly remind us, in the
words of Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity. Science offers us a yet more powerful expression
of this Biblical concept: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that the tendency
of all systems - of which the universe is one - is to dissipate energy over time until
it reaches a state of complete rest. Given a sufficient span, our universe and its superclusters
of galaxies will all collapse and we will enter what scientists call a Dark Era, in
which - after so much excitement, individual and cosmic - nothing will remain except for
a dilute quite gas of photons and leptons. The situation is no better closer to home.
In about 4 billion years, when the sun runs out of hydrogen, it will become a ‘red giant’
star, possibly expanding as far as Mars, at which point it will absorb and destroy Earth.
To repeat the point with NASA’s help: "all truly is vanity."
III. Forgiveness - Evolution
It’s often deeply tempting to lose our temper with ourselves and our fellow humans: why
can’t we be more reasonable? Why are we so prejudiced? Why are we so prone to anxiety?
Why do we eat so much? Why are we so interested in pornography?
It’s equally tempting to search for explanations that emphasise our villainous natures and
then to harshly condemn our lack of self-command. We end up disgusted with ourselves and judgemental
towards others. But science - arguably more effectively than
religion - can teach us the art of forgiveness, and liberate us from our urge to criticise.
Of course, we are less than ideally adapted to the civilised and complex lives we aspire
to lead. We have had very little time to do anything else.
Science tells us that we appeared in more or less our current form in Africa 200,000
years ago. For most of this time, we lived in small groups, we foraged, we grunted, we
didn’t wait for others to stop talking, we fought constantly, and we were terrified
of everything. The time since the birth of Jesus comprises
1% of our history; the last 250 years, the period since we became urbanised and began
living with technology, encompasses a mere 0.1%. Naturally, therefore, most of our impulses
are going to be better suited to more basic conditions. It’s a miracle we ever manage
to be polite, to explain our feelings, or to see it from another’s point of view.
We are - from the vantage point of science - doing extremely well indeed. Evolutionary
history teaches us that humans should be a lot worse than they are. The wonder isn’t
in the end that we’re so uncivilised but that we ever even manage, now and then, to
have a few moments of civilisation.
IV: Our Existence - Cosmic Gratitude
Science is supremely capable of nurturing feelings of gratitude because of a basic truth
about the way gratitude works: it stems from an awareness of how much more awful things
might have been. And here, when it comes to our life on the
planet, science tells us that we have so much to be grateful for. For example, we can be
grateful: - that 13.8 billion years ago, something smaller
than an electron chose to swell within a fraction of a second like an expanding balloon into
a zone permeated with energy 93 billion light years in size that we now clumsily call the
universe - That some of the energy from this swift
expansion was able to coagulate into particles, which grouped together to form the light atoms
of hydrogen, lithium and helium - which then assembled into galaxies, which gave birth
to stars, inside whose molten burning cores all the elements necessary for the nucleic
acids essential to life were forged. - That gravity drew the stars together to
create galaxies (a hundred billion of them), including - fortuitously - the Milky Way,
a small corner of the universe containing just 400 billion stars, in which our sun was
born out of a giant, spinning cloud of dust and gas 4.5 billion years ago.
- That around the same time, swarms of debris collided to form our Earth - a lava-washed,
uninhabitable rock, that gravity happened to throw into orbit as the third planet from
the Sun - the exact right distance for life to develop.
- That another planet, Theia, collided with Earth, gifting us our Moon, which slowed the
Earth’s rotation, stabilised atmospheric conditions and created the 24-hour day and
caused the Earth to tilt, forming the seasons. - That ice particles left over from the collisions
of hundreds of comets melted, water vapour condensed and oceans were formed.
- That comet collisions delivered anot her chance cosmic gift, the essential components
of life and DNA like ribose, carbon dioxide, ethanol, amino acids and phosphorus.
- That underwater hot springs released the right amount of energy and the right mix of
chemicals to allow the first single-cell organisms to form four billion years ago.
- That Earth’s toxic atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide slowly became sweetened
by the release of oxygen from cyanobacteria- the first creatures to photosynthesise - and
gradually oxygenated 85% of the atmosphere. - That an asteroid 15 kilometres wide happened
to hit Earth 65.5 million years ago and destroyed most terrestrial organisms including all non-avian
dinosaurs, but created ideal conditions in which some small, furry mammals, our close
ancestors, were able to thrive with less competition. - That your genes managed to pass safely through
an unbroken 10,000 generation chain, despite the best efforts of cyclones, predators and
a constant barrage of viruses. - That an average, fertile woman will have
100,000 eggs, and a man will produce a trillion sperm, each of these very different, but that
- nevertheless - you have managed to emerge from the options as you are.
And to all this, as they used to say in the churches, one might cry (or whisper): Hallelujah!
There is enough in science to give birth to twenty religions - so much to worship, to
be awed by and to be consoled through, things like dark matter, string theory or quantum
wavefunctions. The curse of the modern world is not to have invented science; it’s not
yet to have understood all the amazing things one might still do with it.
At the School of Life we run regular virtual classes for adults. These mini life courses cover such topics as: making relationships work,
overcoming anger and anxiety, career guidance, finding meaning and purpose in life and using culture as a therapeutic tool. Click the link on screen now to learn more.