Sunday, August 7, 2016

Intellectual Arrogance and Faith in Science

All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.” – Acts 17:21-23

As a trained Pharisee, I’m sure Paul was impressed by the intellectual zeal of the Athenian philosophers. They loved knowledge and understanding, and wanted to approach everything in life with a rational view. Doesn’t this sound familiar! We live in a world where people love the titillation of new scientific discovery, stuff their heads with scientific factoids of no possible value to their lives (like the Large Hadron Collider, pictured at right), and place their hope for the resolution of suffering in technological breakthroughs, surely just around the corner, that will herald a new age of peace, prosperity and happiness.

Of course, this is all fantasy. Or perhaps even a malicious lie.

Just look at the past hundred years. The science of eugenics said that we could perfect the human race only if we selectively remove inferior individuals, which led to the horrors of the holocaust. Chemistry told us that a new wonder called DDT would wipe out mosquitoes and eliminate malaria, which did untold damage to ecosystems. Science has harnessed the stored energy of fossil fuels, which in releasing humans from physical labour have started a global climatic crisis we may not be able to contain.

The problem is, of course, arrogance. We think we understand things, and we do understand them just enough to manipulate them for short term gain. But of course our comprehension is shallow: we don’t fully understand things, and we have absolutely no inkling of the unintended consequences. Our world is far more complicated than we would like it to be, and certainly more complicated than our simplistic models of it.


So it this knowledge, this science really worthy of our love and hope? Where should we put our trust?