BUILDING A BETTER GOD
In the final analysis, what we are invoking when we use
the term ‘science’ is not the mish-mash of individual, often contradictory, or
at least irreconcilable, disciplines that have their actual existence under the
blanket of that title, but an ‘entity’ or ‘spirit’ without independent
existence – not even latent within the said disciplines, but a product of the
same conceptualisation of omniscience and deity that personifies all gods.
Rational and twenty-first century as we conceive ourselves
to be, we gawp in awe and wonder at the miracles of war, drought, plague and
DAB radio, and behold an all-powerful, all-seeing, all knowing master of the
universe.
No science, or combination of sciences, is that thing or
anything like it. It, and its constituent parts, are disciplines directed – at
least in theory – toward the understanding, ordering and classification of the
subjects of its observations.
It is neither those things themselves nor the final
arbiter of their essence.
Engineering, as a subject, doesn’t claim ownership,
preaching rights or omniscience with regard to the mountains through which it
tunnels or the rivers and valleys it bridges. It is a discipline and an
activity that has a defined result and a clear purpose.
Individual pursuits within the ‘science’ umbrella also
have such clarity of purpose, but taken together they lack the cohesion imagined
by the faithful, leaving elements vulnerable to less than benign influences and
permitting the omniscience construct to take on the culturally stupefying
political cause of fundamentalist materialism.
Thus we move on from gods we have become too ‘rational’ to
believe in to a new-fangled god that doesn’t believe in us.
No part of ‘science’ has ever proved or disproved the
existence of god or gods, but it has certainly demonstrated the existence of a
need for, and the ability to bring into being, reliable omniscient deities that
can be both the focus and the product of shared belief.
From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository
From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository
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