How Science Can Be As Comforting As Religion

For centuries, it looked as if religion was trying to tell us facts about the world and just got things a bit wrong. For example, how old the Earth was. It claimed 4,000 years old. Or how many suns there were in the universe. It claimed one. But in reality, religion was never really interested in doing the sorts of things that science does. It might have thrown off the odd theory, but at heart, it cared about a mission altogether different. It wanted to tell us stories to make life feel more bearable. It was interested in giving us something to hold on to that could help us to make it through to the next day. At the same time, science, properly viewed, has never been the enemy of spiritual enrichment. It can yield ideas, every bit as consoling and inspiring as those found in religion. We can usefully look to science for the sort of ideas that we used to seek in religion. Here are four big, consoling ideas that can be found in science. 1. Perspective We are at permanent risk, in the conditions of modern life, of losing perspective, that is, of making more of our troubles and fears than is good for us. One of the great benefits of science is that it can help us to feel small. Science teaches us that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has approximately 100 billion stars in it, that there are 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each of which contains an average of 100 billion stars, which means that there are around a billion trillion stars out there. When we lose perspective, as we invariably do in the course of pretty much every day in the frenetic city, we should spend a few moments with a photograph from the Hubble telescope and remember that we are, in a glorious and redemptive way, what we always feared, nothing. 2. Vanity Many of our efforts are designed to perpetuate ourselves in time. We strive to live on through our work and to make something more enduring than our biological selves. To release us from this exhausting and vainglorious folly, religions used to kindly remind us, in the words of Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity. Science offers us a yet more powerful expression of this biblical concept, the second law of thermodynamics. This states that the tendency of all systems, of which the universe is one, is to dissipate energy over time until it reaches a state of complete rest. Given a sufficient span, our universe and its superclusters of galaxies will all collapse and we will enter what scientists call a dark era, in which, after so much excitement, individual and cosmic, nothing will remain except for a dilute, quiet gas of photons and leptons. The situation is no better closer to home. In about four billion years, when the sun runs out of hydrogen, it will become a red giant star, possibly expanding as far as Mars, at which point it will absorb and destroy Earth. To repeat the point, but this time with NASA's help, all truly is vanity. Thirdly, forgiveness. It's often tempting to lose our temper with ourselves and our fellow humans. Why can't we be more reasonable? Why are we so prejudiced? Why are we so prone to anxiety? Why do we eat so much? Why are we so interested in pornography? It's equally tempting to search for explanations that emphasise our villainous natures and then to harshly condemn our lack of self-command. We end up disgusted with ourselves and judgmental towards others. But science, arguably more effectively than religion, can teach us the art of forgiveness and liberate us from our urge to criticise. Of course we are less than ideally adapted to the civilised and complex lives we aspire to lead. We've had very little time to do anything else. Science tells us that we appeared in more or less our current form in Africa 200,000 years ago. For most of this time, we lived in small groups, we foraged, we grunted, we didn't wait for others to stop talking, we fought constantly and we were terrified of everything. The time since the birth of Jesus comprises 1% of our history. The last 250 years, the period since we became urbanised and began living with technology, encompasses a mere 0.1%. Naturally, therefore, most of our impulses are going to be better suited to more basic conditions. It's a miracle, frankly, that we ever manage to be polite, to explain our feelings or to see it from another's point of view. We are, from the vantage point of science, doing extremely well indeed. Evolutionary history teaches us that humans should be a lot worse than they are. The wonder isn't in the end that we're so uncivilised, but that we ever even manage now and then to have a few moments of civilisation. Fourthly, our existence. Science is supremely capable of nurturing feelings of gratitude because of a basic truth about the way gratitude works. It stems from an awareness of how much more awful things might have been. And here, when it comes to our life on the planet, science tells us that we have so much to be grateful for. For example, we can be grateful that 13.8 billion years ago, something smaller than an electron chose to swell within a fraction of a second, like an expanding balloon, into a zone permeated with energy 93 billion light-years in size that we now clumsily call the universe. We can be grateful that some of the energy from this swift expansion was able to coagulate into particles which grouped together to form light atoms of hydrogen, lithium and helium, which then assembled into galaxies which gave birth to stars inside whose molten burning cores all the elements necessary for the nucleic acids essential to life were forged. We can be grateful that gravity drew these stars together to create galaxies, a hundred billion of them, including fortuitously the Milky Way, a small corner of the universe containing just 400 billion stars in which our sun was born out of a giant spinning cloud of dust and gas 4.5 billion years ago. We can be grateful that around the same time, swarms of debris collided to form our Earth, a lava-washed, uninhabitable rock that gravity happened to throw into orbit as the third planet from the sun, the exact right distance for life to develop. We can be grateful that another planet, Theia, collided with Earth, gifting us our moon, which slowed the Earth's rotation, stabilised atmospheric conditions and created the 24-hour day and caused the Earth to tilt, forming the seasons. We can be grateful that ice particles, left over from the collisions of hundreds of comets, melted, water vapour condensed and oceans were formed. We can be grateful that comet collisions delivered another chance cosmic gift, the essential components of life and DNA like ribose, carbon dioxide, ethanol, amino acids and phosphorus. We can be grateful that underwater hot springs released the right amount of energy and the right mix of chemicals to allow the first single-cell organisms to form 4 billion years ago. We can be grateful that the Earth's toxic atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide slowly became sweetened by the release of oxygen from cyanobacteria, the first creatures to photosynthesize and gradually oxygenated 85% of the atmosphere. We can be grateful that an asteroid 15km wide happened to hit Earth 65.5 million years ago and destroyed most terrestrial organisms, including those non-avian dinosaurs, but created ideal conditions in which small furry mammals, our close ancestors, were able to thrive with less competition. We can be grateful that your genes managed to pass safely through an unbroken 10,000 generation chain, despite the best efforts of cyclones, predators and a constant barrage of viruses. And we can be grateful that an average fertile woman will have 100,000 eggs and a man will produce a trillion sperm, each of these very different, but that nevertheless you have managed to emerge from all the options just as you are. And to all this, as they used to say in the churches, one might cry or whisper hallelujah. There is enough in science to give birth to 20 religions, so much to worship, to be awed by and to be consoled through, things like dark matter, string theory or quantum wave functions. The curse of the modern world is not to have invented science, it's not yet to have understood all the amazing things one might still do with it. At the School of Life, we run regular virtual classes for adults. 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