A Guest Appearance from Islington

A child walks into a room and there’s a lego set in a bucket. The first thing he does is up-end the whole lot onto the floor and start putting the bits together. Okay, maybe a few go into his mouth, a few will inevitably end up down the cushions of the sofa, and one or two are also duty bound to find their way into the vacuum cleaner. But at some point you can guarantee that Junior will plop an assortment of shapes on your knee and say – “Look: I’ve made a dog/house/car/mummy/tree.*” (*delete as appropriate)
So it is with man and science. We’ve got very good at playing with our little building blocks. We like what happens when we mix X with Y. We like learning what it is that makes Z tick. We’ve learned that if we put a bit of scorpion DNA into a bit of wheat DNA we can get something out the other end that can fight of predators. We’ve learned that if we smash atoms together hard enough we can get a very big explosion, and we’ve learned something about the mind-bendingly complicated maths that dictate the way the universe works.
But all we’re doing is playing with building blocks. We’re not creating anything. We’re so carried away with our clever little brick piles that we’ve forgotten who it was that put them there in the first place. For all its glorious achievements, mankind has still not created anything other than mutations. You might argue that we “made” dolly the sheep, but we didn’t create it. We just copied the blue print laid down long before our meddling hands saw fit to try and unravel it. The poor creature died anyway, after several miserable years of infirmity. As clever as we are we can’t create as much as a hamster.
We also can’t cure the common cold, or cancer, or a broken heart. We can’t distribute food to the hungry, or make it rain where we need to, or invent a fuel source that doesn’t choke the planet that was given to us.
But still we put our faith into science as if God had been made redundant by our cleverness. To Quote Brian Appleyard in Understanding the Present “When a person stops believing in God, he or she starts believing in anything.” Is it any wonder that so many New Age cults have sprung up? If we’re so clever, why is it that so many people are searching for something to believe n? intelligent, soulful people are lapping up books full of Positive Platitudes and thinking it will change their lives.
We already have a book that will change your life. People have died to preserve its message so that you can read and accept it. They even give it away free. But it’s old. And in this age of “fresh ideas”, “smart thinking” and “power lunches” we haven’t got time for old.
We’ve all joined the Flavour of the Month Club. Is it any wonder? Science has supplanted religion, but look how inconsistent it is. Einstein comes along and turns everything Newton told us upside down. Hawking came along and did that to Newton. To say nothing of Gullick, Darwin, Dawkins and Pinker. Science has become the Cult of Celebrity, where every five years, a new wave of thinking casts aside everything that had once been fact, and gives us a new set of rules to believe in. If we’re lucky enough to buy the book, we can include ourselves in this new Progressive Thinking Elite of the enlightened. Note I said “buy”. How many copies of A Brief History of Time were ever actually read past chapter two?
Science has not made us happier. It has not fulfilled our lives or purified our planet. In a world where even the smartest minds in science cannot agree on the basic building blocks of physics, to whom do we turn for the truth? In a world where the laws of physics seem to be in daily flux, isn’t it actually better to have something that doesn’t change? The message of the Bible may be old and unfashionable, but at least it’s consistant.
Ultimately, I expect this short term fixation with Chaos Theory and DNA splicing will pass. Because at some point, most of us are going to be old, and many of us are going to be alone. And when that time in our life comes, it would be nice to think there was more peace available than a book of equations.
Science may be entertaining, but science doesn’t love us.