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?
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