I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep.
They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this
founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and
cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous
with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a
maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a
horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken
full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long
childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates
us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to
mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric
to learn many of the things we need to know.
So here are Adam and Eve, who have awakened full grown, without the
tenderness and memory of childhood. They have no mother, nor did
they ever have one. The idea of a mammal without a mother is, by
definition, tragic. It's the deepest kind of wound for our species;
antithetical to our flourishing, to who we are.
Their father is a terrifying, disembodied voice who is furious with
them from the moment they first awaken. He doesn't say, "Welcome to
the planet Earth, my beautiful children! Welcome to this paradise.
Billions of years of evolution have shaped you to be happier here
than anywhere else in the vast universe. This is your paradise."
No, instead God places Adam and Eve in a place where there can be
no love; only fear, and fear-based behavior, obedience. God
threatens to kill Adam and Eve if they disobey his wishes. God
tells them that the worst crime, a capital offense, is to ask a
question; to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. What
kind of father is this? As Diderot observed, the God of Genesis
"loved his apples more than he did his children."
This imperative not to be curious is probably the most self-hating
aspect of all, because what is our selective advantage as a
species? We're not the fastest. We're not the strongest. We're not
the biggest. However, we do have one selective advantage that has
enabled us to survive and prosper and endure: A fairly large brain
relative to our body size. This has made it possible for us to ask
questions and to recognize patterns. And slowly over the
generations we've turned this aptitude into an ability to
reconstruct our distant past, to question the very origins of the
universe and life itself. It's our only advantage, and yet this is
the one thing that God does not want us to have: consciousness,
self-awareness.
Perhaps Genesis should be read as an ironic story. Here's a god who
does not give us the knowledge of good and evil. He knows we don't
know right from wrong. Yet he tells us not to do something anyway.
How can someone who doesn't know right from wrong be expected to do
the right thing? By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian
prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never
question authority. We become our human selves.
Our nation was founded on a heroic act of disobedience to a king
who was presumed to rule by divine right. We created social and
legal mechanisms to institutionalize the questioning of authority
and the participation of every person in the decision-making
process. It's the most original thing about us, our greatest
contribution to global civilization. Today, our not-exactly-elected
officials try to make it seem as if questioning this ancient story
is wrong. . . . That the teaching of our evolving understanding of
nature, which is a product of what we have been able to discover
over generations, is somehow un-American or disrespectful of
strongly held beliefs. As if we should not teach our children what
we've learned about our origins, but rather we should continue to
teach them this story which demonizes the best qualities of our
founding fathers.
This makes no sense and it leads me to a question: Why do we
separate the scientific, which is just a way of searching for
truth, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that
inspire love and awe? Science is nothing more than a never-ending
search for truth. What could be more profoundly sacred than that?
I'm sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most,
believing at this very moment, will be revealed at some future time
to be merely a product of our age and our history and our
understanding of reality. So here's this process, this way, this
mechanism for finding bits of reality. No single bit is sacred. But
the search is.
And so we pursue knowledge by using the scientific method to
constantly ferret out all the mistakes that human beings
chronically make, all of the lies we tell ourselves to combat our
fears, all of the lies we tell each other. Here's science, just
working like a tireless machine. It's a phenomenally successful
one, but its work will never be finished.
In four hundred years, we evolved from a planet of people who are
absolutely convinced that the universe revolves around us. No
inkling that the Sun doesn't revolve around us, let alone that we
are but a minuscule part of a galaxy that contains roughly a
hundred billion stars. If scientists are correct, if recent
findings of planets that revolve around other stars are correct,
there are perhaps five hundred billion worlds in this galaxy, in a
universe of perhaps another hundred billion galaxies. And it is
conceivable, even possible, that this universe might one day be
revealed to be nothing more than an electron in a much greater
universe. And here's a civilization that was absolutely clueless
four or five hundred years ago about its own tiny world and the
impossibly greater vastness surrounding it. We were like a little
bunch of fruit flies going around a grape, and thinking this grape
is the center of everything that is. To our ancestors the universe
was created for one particular gender of one particular species of
one particular group among all the stunning variety of life to be
found on this tiny little world.
There was only one problem. These very special beings for whom the
universe was created had a holiday called Easter and they wanted to
be able to celebrate it on the same day at the same time. But in
this geocentric universe that they blissfully inhabited, there was
no way to create a workable calendar that was coherent. At this
time, there was a phrase to describe what science was. It is
suffused with disarming candor and not a bit of self-consciousness
at all. It was called saving the appearances. That was the task of
science: To save the appearances. Figure out a way to take the
reported appearances of the stars and the planets in the sky and
predict with some reliability where they would be in the future.
It's almost as if they knew they were living a cosmic lie. To call
it saving the appearances is wonderful.
So the Lateran Council of 1514 was convened, and one of its main
goals was to figure out a calendar that everybody could use so that
they won't be celebrating Easter on different days. A man named
Nicolas Copernicus, who was a very religious guy, whose lifelong
career was in the church, had already figured out what the problem
was. He was invited to present this information at the Council, but
he declined because he knew how dangerous it would be to puncture
this cosmological illusion. Even though the pope at that moment was
not actually terribly exercised about this idea, Copernicus's fears
were not baseless. Even sixty years later, a man named Giordano
Bruno was burned alive for one reason: he would not utter the
phrase, "There are no other worlds."
