Dedicated to Dr. Jaydeep Mukherjee
In Friendship & Admiration

Imagine a ship whose owner is short-sighted, a bit deaf, and more or less ignorant of seamanship. The crew quarrel about who should take the helm of the ship. None of them have devoted any time to the study of navigation, and do not in fact believe it can be taught.

Factions compete to take control of the ship; and when they do, they help themselves to the goods on board. The voyage soon turns into a kind of drunken pleasure cruise. None of them realize that a navigator needs to study the weather and the position of the stars; they think of anyone who acquires the relevant skills as a useless stargazer. Our state, in its present form, is like the ship, lurching around in the hands of the unskilled crew. Only in the hands of skilled navigators will it be kept under control.

Are we even perplexed by our own inability to defeat those who seek to discredit science and crush the immensity of our potential? Not at all. The task that confronts us today is in a way unprecedented. The fusion of evidence and denial has reached the point where the potential implications of the continuation of this dangerous dichotomy may forever threaten our ability to search for truth. Perhaps some numbers would be pertinent at this point.

In the past five years alone, the percentage of U.S. college students receiving science degrees has dropped by over 25%. Large majorities of secondary students fail to reach proficiency in mathematics and science. Many are taught by teachers who not only lack adequate subject matter knowledge and experience, but who actively discourage scientific thought by promoting popular religious falsehoods. It is often said that every child is a natural born scientist, yet all too often this inherent sense of curiosity and wonder about the world is eventually broken by the call to faith rather than in support of the pursuit of truth.

We must stick to the facts and see what they bear out. Upon anything else we cannot comment authoritatively. There are many who claim that our very existence is proof of our creator, proponents of so-called intelligent design. The earth is the perfect distance from the sun; the moon is the perfect distance from the earth, and so on. If all these variables were not so, life would not be possible. Thus, there must have been a grand designer. Though these people are just the same as the puddle described by Douglas Adams who wakes up one morning and says to himself: “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well; it must have been made just for me.”

Scientists are perfectly willing to say that there are many things that they do not know. The universe is queerer than we understand and it may even be queerer than we can understand. We know there will be great new discoveries; we know we will live to see great things, and we acquiesce to the tremendous amount of uncertainty. That is the whole distinction. The believer has to say not just that there is a god, the deist position we cannot disprove, but that there is a mind at work in the universe and that they know that mind. They can interpret it, they’re on good terms with it, and they get occasional revelations from it. It seems a cruel game that the creator of a thirteen-and-a-half billion year-old universe reveals himself just two thousand years ago on this tiny planet in an insignificant corner of the universe, maliciously demanding the planet’s inhabitants to believe in and worship him, but hiding all evidence for his existence except a book written by primitives who knew relatively nothing about the natural laws that governed their lives. It has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jewish people as proof of the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say: “I will prove to you the truth of what I have told you by producing the people who say it is false.”

Thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic and stirring these myths may be, they are not actually true. Yet even now certain types of postmodern thinkers say things like the following: “Who are you to elevate scientific ‘truth’ so? The tribal beliefs passed down are true in the sense that they hang together in a meshwork of consistency with the rest of the tribe’s worldview. Scientific ‘truth’ is only one kind. Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific.” But the postmodernist entrusts his safety while traveling to a Boeing 747, not a magic carpet or a broomstick, just as he takes his tumor to the best surgeon available rather than the nearest shaman.

Science predicts, with complete certainty unless the end of the world intervenes, that the city of Shanghai will experience a total eclipse of the sun on July 22nd, 2009. Theories about the moon devouring the sun god may be poetic, and they may cohere with other aspects of a tribe’s world view, but they won’t predict the date, time, and place of an eclipse. Science will, and with accuracy you could set your watch by.

This is why science is corrosive to faith and faith is corrosive to science. For every true faith is infallible. It performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishment of an objective truth. Here, the ways of men divide. If you merely want to achieve happiness and peace of mind, have faith. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then search. We ought to stand on our own two feet and look fairly and squarely at the world; its good facts, its bad facts, its beauty, and its ugliness. We can see the world for what it is and not be afraid of it; conquer it with our own intelligence and never be diverted by what we wish to believe.