Scientific versus Religious Stories of the World
Having shown you why religion has been so important throughout human evolution, now I can show you why religion is causing so much trouble in the modern world, and why it’s only going to get worse on our present course.
We can divide the life cycle of the universe up into five sections: The beginning, the past, the present, the future, and the ending. Science works by people studying the how the world works in the present, without any pre-conceived ideas about what they’re going to find. Scientists can form hypotheses and then look for evidence to support or contradict them, but that’s not the same thing as deciding ahead of time that something must be true and then only looking for evidence to support it and ignoring any evidence that contradicts it. That’s what all the people who argue against evolution do.
Once scientists figure out how the universe works in the present, they can reverse-engineer the universe to see how the past created the present. If they know what the world is like now, and they know how it works, then they can back up to see what it must’ve been like in the past in order for the laws they’ve discovered to have created the present. Of course, different fields of science study different things, so scientists aren’t backing up through the life cycle of the universe one year at a time; different branches of science move at different rates. But whatever branch of science you’re studying, that’s how science works.
If you back up through time far enough, you reach the origins of the universe. This was discovered by astro-physicists. It’s called the Big Bang.
If you’ve ever heard an emergency vehicle drive past you with its sirens blaring, you may have noticed that it gave off a higher pitched sound when it was approaching you, and a lower pitched sound when it was driving away from you. That’s called the Doppler effect. When the vehicle was approaching you, the motion of the vehicle was compressing the sound waves, because each part of the sound started closer to you than the last. Likewise, when the vehicle was driving away from you, it stretched the sound waves out, because each part of the sound started further away from you than the last. Changing the frequency of sound waves makes the sounds either higher or lower pitched.
Light waves work the same way. The headlights of an oncoming car have a shorter wavelength than they do when the car is stopped. If someone has a broken taillight that’s giving off white light, that light has a longer wavelength when the car is driving away from you. That makes the headlights of an oncoming car bluer than they are when the car is stopped, and it makes the exposed taillights redder than when the car is stopped. The car is moving so slowly compared to the speed of light that these shifts are unnoticeable. When you build high-powered telescopes specifically to look for this, and point them at stars, you can detect blue and red shifts.
All the galaxies are moving away from each other, spreading out from a central point. Since all the galaxies were acting like the debris of a giant explosion, and that’s supported by a lot more physics that’s more complicated than I’ll bother trying to explain, scientists could see that the universe must’ve begun with a giant explosion.
For a long time scientists thought the Big Bang was one huge explosion—hence the term Big Bang. But now with further evidence, it looks it wasn’t quite that simple. It was something like a big explosion, so the scientists who first discovered it were on the right track, but now it looks like the explosion might not be over yet. If the Big Bang was an explosion like we understand explosions, all the galaxies should be slowing down. Instead, they’re speeding up—as though there’s some sort of ongoing explosion in the center of the universe. This further evidence doesn’t prove the universe didn’t begin with a big explosion; with the further evidence we’ve just learned more about how the explosion worked.
In effect, the scientific version of the origin of the universe is what you would get if the Book of Genesis was an entry in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. As more information comes in, people are constantly revising the story of how the universe began.
It is true that sometimes scientists develop strong emotional attachments to their hypotheses and won’t give them up when new evidence comes in to refute them. But scientists are only human.
When new evidence come along that contradicts some conclusions scientists have drawn before, a lot of scientists usually kick and scream and try to disprove the new evidence. But that isn’t the same as religious people kicking and screaming when science disproves something they believed to be true. Scientists devote a lot of time and energy to studying science, and they build up careers and reputations for themselves that way. If you disprove what they thought they had proven, you threaten their careers and their reputations. But that’s nowhere near the same thing as threatening their sense of the meaning of life and 2,000 years of doctrine and their ability to manipulate other people’s minds, or anything to that effect, which is what happens when scientists disprove people’s religious beliefs.
By figuring out how the origins of the universe created the past, and the past created the present, scientists can project those discoveries into the future and see how they will continue to unfold until the universe ends. Figuring out how the universe is going to end is interesting from an academic standpoint, for the sake of satisfying people’s curiosity, but none of us are going to live that long, so it doesn’t seem like it would have any practical applications in life. However, it does make a good reference point. If you can see how laws of physics are going to play out from the beginning of the universe to the end, you can see how whatever is happening to you now fits into that, so you can see how this event began and how it’s going to end. Of course, that sequence of events isn’t going to end for a long time, so this is, as I said, just a point of reference.
That brings us to the real value of science. By figuring out how the origin of the universe created the past and the past created the present, scientists—or anyone else who learns how science works—can see how the chain of events that led from the past to the present will continue to unfold into the future. That gives people the choice to make different things happen by acting differently and making those chains of cause and effect unfold differently. This is also known as informed decision making. Informed decision-making depends on people having information. The discovery of accurate information is the whole point of science.
I think it’s worth pointing out here that science isn’t devoted to the control of information. Capitalism is devoted to the control of information. That’s called intellectual property. But information can just as easily be distributed for free to everyone, so everyone can put it to use. That’s why we have Indy Media.
Religions—or three really big religions that spring to mind, at least—define their own version of the end of the universe. That renders religion completely useless for predicting the outcomes of events—meaning the outcomes of decisions people make. Religious people begin with an understanding of how the universe works right now, just like scientists do. But then they make up their own story about how the universe began. Then, to explain how the origins of the universe led up to the present, they have to invent their own chain of cause and effect. A fictitious chain of cause and effect doesn’t let them accurately predict the outcomes of the decisions they’re making now.
Instead, they write their own version of how the universe is supposed to end. But they don’t have the information they need to make informed decisions about the outcomes of their actions, so they can’t anticipate the results of their actions and choose to act differently. What they end up doing instead is continuing to invent their own story of the world as the present unfolds into the future (or rather, as the future becomes the present), to explain how the unexpected effects of their actions are leading up to the way they’ve already decided the universe is supposed to end.
Basically, they’ve chosen to stumble along in the dark and insist that’s what people are supposed to do, because any time anyone tries to turn on a light, people realize they don’t live in the world the religious people told them they do.
People have always felt the need to understand how the universe works, so they can anticipate the results of their actions. All animal life depends on creatures being able to make accurate predictions. But when you grow so dependant on your religion to feel like you understand how the universe works that you have to make up your own stories to explain why things aren’t working out the way you thought they would, that’s a serious problem. That’s religious fundamentalism. Christians and Muslims aren’t the only people who can be religious fundamentalists. Anyone can be a religious fundamentalist. I’ve met plenty of Pagan fundamentalists and Agnostic fundamentalists.
Religious fundamentalism is a giant socially contrived emotional defense mechanism. In psychology, there’s a term that’s used to describe people who believe in things that aren’t real, who reject information that contradicts what they believe, and who harm themselves and other people when they act upon their fantastical beliefs. It’s called “mentally ill”. If a majority of people in America suffer from the same mental illness, that doesn’t prove it isn’t a mental illness, that only proves that the inmates are running the asylum. But you probably knew that already.
All religion is inherently authoritarian. By definition, a religion is the belief in things that can’t be proven or disproven. People always act upon what they believe to be true about the world. If some of the things you believe in are completely imaginary, when you act upon what you believe to be true, you’re trying to force the world to work the way you want it to work. You could’ve developed the intellectual and emotional maturity you need to figure out how the pieces of the world fit together with each other, and then adapt your perception of the world to that (which is what scientists do), but you didn’t. Instead, you figured out how all the things you can observe about the world fit best with your current perception of the world, and then invented your own imaginary forces to fill in the gaps and make the pieces of the world fit with each other.
By acting upon your beliefs in imaginary things, and placing a higher value on your feelings of understanding how the world works than you place on being able to predict the results of your actions, you are expecting other people, or other species, to bear the burden of the unexpected results of your actions. You’re expecting other people or other species to pay the price of supporting your emotional weakness. And you can’t even see why they would have a problem with that, because you can’t accurately predict the results of your actions in the first place, so you don’t even realize you’re doing this.