The clinching argument for science …

… and, needless to say, against religion.

At the end of the book The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen (Allen Lane, ISBN: 978-1-846-14432-5) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, professors of particle and theoretical physics respectively at the University of Manchester and science writers, I read the following:

“There is something absolutely fundamental that we do not yet understand.

With that sentence, we come to the end of our story [the book narrative] because we have reached the edge of our knowledge.”

I am not going to claim that I have read a lot of popular science books, be they in physics, evolution, biology, mathematics (including biographies of scientists), but can and do claim that I am not completely illiterate in this regard. I have also read a few books of the so-called spiritual genre, but all of them translated into current language and not in the original (I do not know Sanskrit, Latin, Hebrew/Yiddish, Arabic, Aramaic, languages of the Inuits, Mayans, Aztecs and all others that have hoary spiritual traditions). This, I believe, should not matter, because it is spirituality’s claim that its teachings retain their validity across eons. This necessarily implies that translations into the current languages do not dilute spiritual teaching.

More importantly, my reading of science is also in a translation, from mathematics to English, giving the go by to the deep mathematics in which the spirituality of science is indeed written. Therefore, I am justified in weighing my understanding of science and religion within the context I am restricting myself to – of limited scope and as an outsider to both – and pronounce a judgment on the same.

Over the years I have come to rate popular science books on one scale and only one scale – how and how much they explicitly admit to the ignorance that has driven what they have explained. What I mean is, do they say, “We do not know” in a sense of resignation or one of excitement, like “WE DON’T KNOW! SO FANTASTIC!”? The arrogance of science comes not from knowing, but from comprehending that much is unknown and the Rumsfeldian, “I may or may not even know what I do not know!”

I can tell you that the author(s) of every popular science book I have read, and I mean EVERY book, has expressed a sense of wonder at what she does not know, not a sense of fear. NEVER. The lines quoted above carry exactly that mood. Oh, you could argue that I have been fortunate to have read only those kinds of popular science books. Having read not a single book of a different mien, I can neither accept nor dispute that line of argument.

This mood becomes endemic to the human mind only through scientific temper, not being afraid of the unknown.

And, that precisely is the point of departure between science and religion. Among the books on spirituality that I have read, I have not come across the phrase, “I do not know” in any unadulterated form. The fear of exposing one’s ignorance comes through. The best accommodation that religion makes to ignorance is the unctuous, “Who knows the ways of God?”

Indeed, it is to anchor one’s ignorance in an analytical statement*, God had to be invented and His actions had to be circumscribed by the rules and regulations of religion. It should be very easy to prove that religion appeared in human societies before God did, the latter driven by the need to hide why religion came about in the first place – to keep people ignorant, fearing the unknown, for the advantage of a few.

If religion desires to score points with me, it has to do no more than assert in a crystal clear manner that “Religion does not know whether God exists!” I dare religion to do that.

Science, as of now, does not know if the God Particle (Higg’s Boson) exists, but it does not claim that, “Only God’s Particle knows why it imbues matter with mass!” It is only scientists who will know first how matter gets its mass, but only in the sense of predicting the consequences of such a putative mechanism, leaving aside the philosophical question of what mass really is. Religion on the other hand, it is claimed, knows that it is only God who knows what mass is and why His particle imbues matter with it.

Well, that is the difference between science and religion and that is the clinching statement for science and against religion.

More from the book to end this post:

“A cascade of inexplicable results caused excitement and confusion [in the context of what led to the discovery of quantum theory] …

The domain of the known is not the arena of the research scientist …

[S]cience isn’t simply another point of view – it reveals a reality that would be impossible to imagine …

Science is the investigation of the real, and if the real seems surreal then so be it.”

Raghuram Ekambaram

* - To assume what is to be proved, or a statement that cannot be disproved, like “an existing white elephant exists.”