Holy Missing the Point

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.



She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know...”

Dr. Porco misses the point, but apparently The New York Pravda is more than happy to broadcast her opinions- they fit in nicely with the Company's need to rouse their shock troops.

Let's look at the definition of the word evangelize:

Main Entry: evan·ge·lize
Pronunciation: i-'van-j&-"lIz
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -lized; -liz·ing
transitive verb
1 : to preach the gospel to
2 : to convert to Christianity
intransitive verb : to preach the gospel
- evan·ge·li·za·tion /-"van-j&-l&-'zA-sh&n/ noun

Science has no gospel. Science has no Truth. Science is a tool you use with logic to describe facts.

Science is a tool you use to describe the universe. But since the observable universe, and well as the observer's place in the universe, constantly changes, science is not set in stone. The scientific method, like any other logic construct, works regardless, but is not Truth any more than the associative and distributive properties of simple mathematical statements are Truth.

Let's not be silly.

Please, yes, deflate the grandoise delusions and the shambling horrors of the ancient religions. Science, and logic, are ideal tools to do this. The world, as Dr. Dawkins says, has suffered too long under the delusions of its God mythos. But don't set up "Science" in place of God.

Because when you do, it's no longer Science, or even science.