In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: “Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn’t yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: ‘It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.’“
Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we’ve known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There’s no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.
But then Walden brings in religion. “A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense – a belief in the value of human life. [Don’t use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what’s permissible and what isn’t. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don’t mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn’t survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency.”
I’m all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I’m not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We’ve just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody – bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians – seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It’s going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.
If Walden wants to talk about “religion in its widest sense”, I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion’s historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology “chills him to the bone.”
Thought for the day: “When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos