The Tortise and the Hare
A lot of progressively minded people always ask me, “But why do we even need science when we have religion and philosophy? Science can’t give everyone’s lives meaning. And you can’t preserve the beauty of the diversity of humanity by forcing everyone to think the same way.”
First of all, religion and philosophy don’t give people’s lives meaning either; people give their lives meaning. And you can’t talk about the so-called “beauty” of human diversity without talking about all the wars that have been fought, slaves who have been captured, and genocide that’s been committed between people of different countries, religions, and cultures. Ultimately, all of those things happened because the two groups of people had opposing points of view that they couldn’t figure out how to resolve. You could say that they could’ve just taken the time to learn more about each other before jumping to the conclusion that their own point of view was right and the other group’s was wrong. That’s absolutely true. And that process of learning is exactly what science is.
A lot of people always say, “But science can’t possibly explain everything about the world that my religion or philosophy explains.”
By making that argument, you are implicitly claiming to know everything there is to know about science, which you obviously don’t.
Your religion or philosophy is only capable of explaining things people have observed. All the things no one has ever observed are things no one knows about. But the moment you observe something, you produce some observable evidence. Even if the thing you observe isn’t observable to anyone else, the fact that you did observe it and that you believe your idea to be true are pieces of observable evidence. Once you do that, the thing becomes something that can be studied scientifically.
Science and religion have basically been the race between the tortoise and the hare. Some people cared more about feeling like they knew everything in the world, so they figured out what they could figure out, and then they said their god was responsible for the rest. Other people were more patient, so they didn’t take that shortcut and instead studied the world slowly and methodically. And as a result, they have now discovered consistent patterns that stretch from the way electrons orbit protons and neutrons, to the beginning of the universe, to the formation of stars, to the origins of life on Earth, and from there all the way up to the redwood forest, the greenhouse effect, Thai restaurants, nose piercings, and kissing. There are no major gaps left in that chain of cause and effect, nothing left that anyone needs to guess at, and nothing anyone needs to invoke supernatural powers to explain.
A relatively small number of physical laws interacting with each other, created huge numbers of gigantic, complicated patterns that created everything in the entire universe. By studying things that people could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in the world around them, we’ve now discovered how those patterns work, and especially how they affect us here on Earth. It’s taken a huge amount of study to discover how a fairly small amount of physical laws has created a huge amount of diversity in the world.
Compared to that, religion and philosophy are just reality for lazy people.
Where did you think you were ever going to learn this much about science? On commercial television? In public school?