Science unveils religion

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
SCIENCE peels back the darkness of ignorance, bathing humanity in the floodlights of knowledge, scattering superstition and other creatures of the night.
It is science that has dethroned the sun and the moon as gods and set them as they really are, with their not inconsiderable powers of their own, in their natural environs.
Science overthrew Zeus from Olympus, dredged up Poseidon from the depths of the ocean and left him on the seashore to dry, dethroned Seth from his perch on the great pyramid. Science banished Olap and his spirited pantheon of powerful gods in Asgard to Nordish mythology and to appease him gave his son Thor lead roles in modern cinematography.
Science showed that these greats of times past are but phantoms of human imagination and can be easily overthrown with no dire consequences.

Pushing back superstition
Science advances and as it does superstition and all other belief systems recede. The great religions of the world, Christianity, Islam, Bhuddism and all other belief systems are now being scrutinised by a growing number of sceptics who have grown up in a science-based world.
In my humble opinion, whether religions stand or fall depends entirely on how they measure up to truths as they are judged by empirical, science-based knowledge, not received knowledge.
Received knowledge is that which we perceive to be of a divine, supernatural origin as contained in ‘holy writings’ which sane persons have dared not question the veracity of for centuries. Such received knowledge once proclaimed the earth to be the center of the universe and the sun, moon and stars as perfect, unblemished spheres adorning the dome of the sky and revolving around a flat earth.
It was a geocentric universe where the earth was the centre and the sun, moon and stars revolved around it. A supplementary anthropocentric view held that man alone was the jewel in the crown of all creation, and the whole cosmos was there for his use and convenience.
Science has dispelled such received knowledge as utter rubbish but not without cost Early men of science such as Kepler, Giodarno Bruno and Nicholas Copernicus were proclaimed as heretics and suffered much persecution by the church authorities at the time, including death.
Every preacher worth his salt steers clear of science and for a good reason.
The earth is not the center of the universe and the sun, moon and stars are imperfect worlds like our own earth with their own unique characteristics.
If there is a God, It might be found in the colossal forces that keep molecular, stellar, solar and planetary systems in their place in the universe. These forces of speed, gravitation, magnetism, heat, cold, and vacuum operating in time and space were little understood in ages when gods ruled supreme but are today coalescing forcefully into human knowledge and consciousness, advanced there by the slow, methodical and experimental march of science.
Man is attempting to split the atom into ever smaller pieces to understand the building blocks of matter and nature and as more is revealed, more yet remains unrevealed. He has tried to go back and understand the beginning of time and the beginning of the universe and he has only so far stopped at a theory.
His working theories and understanding of the universe and its workings, is continually being reviewed and under attack by new knowledge. We are only at the outer edges looking up at the towering grand fortress of nature, it seems, and are just attempting to scale its slippery slopes using physics nylons.
Time might arrive when we are stopped dead in our tracks by knowledge that sentient beings occupy other worlds in the vast universe. The shock we receive would rival the age of the inquisition, when discerning men would not believe the evidence of their eyes and ears and put to death a giant man of science like Giordano Bruno, a Dominican man of the clothe whose only crime was expressing the fact that the earth was not the center of the universe.
He was excommunicated, and upon refusing to recant his findings this fine man of science, far advanced in his intellect than others of his time and willing to give his life for his views, was burnt at the stake.
Knowing that his thoughts and words would forever be immortalised he declared to his judges and executioners before flames engulfed him: “Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pass the sentence than I receive it.”
He died, we now know, for the truth and no tribunal or court in this world can pardon or undo the monstrous crime perpetrated upon his person and those of very many others.
Ignorance and ignominy have stifled the progress of knowledge far more than we shall ever know because ignominy resides in the population and wields far greater power than knowledge which the very few enlightened possess and because they are few and often appear reclusive, they are often ridiculed and much abused. Time comes to their aid and restores their dignity and place in society, most often posthumously.
The human being is a strange creature. He often doubts the evidence of his own eyes and ears and other senses but when it comes to his religion, he will only allow received knowledge to dominate his entire concern, however flimsy, diabolical or implausible the evidence offered.
Received knowledge as espoused by religion must not be mistaken for philosophical knowledge although both doctrines have intermingled every so often down through the ages. Intellectual wandering of a philosophical nature, such as those that come to us from the discourses of Plato and Aristotle, fit more with science than received wisdom from a higher source since the method of investigation arriving at philosophical insights are scientific.
Certain natural phenomena are wondered at – why do we think, for instance – and logical discourses are supposed and supported and disposed of in a manner not dissimilar to scientific empirical experiments, until a strong philosophical basis or truth is established.
Not so with religion and received or revealed knowledge. Here a belief system is developed, always with the source being something other than human and what is here established becomes unquestionable, irrefutable, infallible, god-directed truth. ‘If god says so, who is man to disprove it.’
Few have ever questioned the most obvious flaw in the received knowledge theorem: Only man has ever spoken on god’s behalf. There exists no book of knowledge in god’s hand. Only one set of writing from that forbidden source was ever given, to our knowledge, on two pieces of rock on Mt Sinai to Mosses. That great man, in his wisdom and in his great anger, broke God’s hand writing upon rock into a million pieces, destroying, in the process, the only verifiable evidence of God’s existence for all time.
The Ten Commandments that have come to us are poor copies in Mosses hand of God’s original. The rampant advance of scientific knowledge is fast peeling back the blinds and the cobwebs of mysticism and exposing religion to the harsh glare of empirical evidence based knowledge.
Where once religious fanaticism forced right thinking scientists such as the sad case of Bruno spoken of above and of forcing another early father of science, Galilei Galileo to recant truth as revealed by his own crude scientific methods, today the reverse is true.
Apologies
The Catholic Church in 1992 apologised for the manner it treated Galileo. There is a lot more than apologies from that source, owed to the memories of a lot of people.
Science is pushing further into regions occupied exclusively by religion. Today man has achieved god-like abilities by being able to clone animals including man himself. Will a cloned human have a soul? Will s/he have a human will and independence of thought and consciousness or will it be a mere copy of the original, a thing to be discarded? Considerations for another discourse.
Man has created machines and invented mind-like synapses that can solve problems and calculate mathematical problems far faster than any human mind. The time is arriving when artificial intelligence will act independently of humans, programming other machines and moving them towards mimicking or even “feeling” human emotions.
In that world, where will god be? Will the machine venerate a spiritual being or will it worship its human creator as its god?
What are the chances that man is not himself a thing created by other intelligences, an experiment to terra-form planet earth? Like Stich in the popular children’s cartoon, Lilo & Stitch, perhaps man is a monstrosity with an innate inclination to do good.
The three laws of robotics written by the late science fiction guru Isaac Asimov certainly give man a godlike perspective from the vantage point of a robot. Or will the autonomous robot of the future discard both man and his gods as entities which have served their usefulness and are thenceforth destined for the scrap heap of history?
Those are questions we have no ready answer for yet but sane minds are no doubt most earnestly engaged on them.
And there are others. One test alone would kill religion as we know it today.
If evidence returned from space probes starting out to search the vast expanses of space reveal that sentient beings inhabit a planet among the trillions out there, it would instantly remove humans as the centrepiece of creation.
Would Christ have performed his redemptive enterprise on those other planets as well as our own?
Yet there is compelling evidence that there are powers out there that control everything from molecules to star systems and galaxies and the universe, perhaps even multiverses.
How is it that molecules operate in their tiny spaces in pretty much the same way as do planetary and star systems? Why are the laws of gravity, magnetism and all the other forces of time and space so precise that they keep molecules and star systems from colliding into each other.
Science has today established that much of space is occupied by dark matter and dark energy. These, for now, remain undetectable by scientific methods available to man.
In an attempt to discover these mysterious forces and energy an international team of scientists built a 27km-long particle collider under Switzerland where particles are shot through the tunnel at speeds nearing the speed of light. Try as they might there has been no hint of what physicists are referring to as the ‘god-particle’.
For now dark matter and dark energy remain dark to man, stoutly beyond detection. Yet scientists believe these forces exist. For how else could they explain much of space beyond detection? They have, for now become a kind of science-based faith, beyond detection but known to be there.
Could not these forces obtain another name? Could we not call these the god-forces?
For they perform roles that have been attributed to our gods since time immemorial. Only this time God remains God at His own majestic molecular, stellar, universal magnificence minus the mortal clothes humans have been dressing him in across the ages.
Discovering God
The god-force is in every living being, to be sure, pulsating with every molecule that constitute the breath of life and in the terrifying quasars and the screams of dying stars across the cosmos. God shall be discovered, if It can be discovered at all, with knowledge applying science.
It is not to be found in revealed knowledge for those only reveal the limitations of men’s knowledge at the time and age when the revealed knowledge came to popular acceptance.
Like the popping frog heads of a certain popular child games machine, revealed knowledge pops up randomly out of everywhere humans are to be found and have to be pounded forcefully back into the hole by the harsh hammer blow of scientific knowledge.
Unfortunately, science can only advance slowly and man is too far drunk on faith to see sense quick enough.