Why Are Religion and Science at Odds?

I mean, seriously, right? They almost never try to tackle the same questions. It's not like the Bible's all "And then God saith unto him, 'The carbon atom hath 243 electrons. Not six, like those jackass scientists say. I mean, who does those guys think they are? With their "methodical empirical testing" and "rigorous peer review" and "lifetimes devoted to assiduous and dispassionate study of minute concepts"? How could they know more about something than some guy who occasionally reads the Drudge Report?'"

I suppose I just revealed where my sympathies lie here. But I think religion gets unfairly sucked in to the real issue, which is "science vs. crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists." Take global warming, for example. So 99% of all scientists agree that it's a serious problem. And there's a huge percentage of Americans who don't believe in it, because ... why, exactly? Because it sounds scary? Because they read that a couple scientists, out of the thousands doing work on the topic, sweetened their numbers a bit once? So by that logic, if a few people steal office supplies, then no one has ever bought a stapler in the history of the world?

I'm getting off track here. I just get very frustrated with people who don't believe in established scientific principles for no good reason. Look, scientists spend their entire lives studying these things. They go through incredibly rigorous processes to test their theories, from the controls in each study to the aforementioned peer review, by which other scientists gleefully tear apart any weaknesses. This process has worked extremely well to develop the many principles that have since been used to create everything from iPods to McDonald's hamburgers (which are actually sophisticated alloys of magnesium and cat snot -- I'm sorry, did you not know that?)

I'm not suggesting you should believe every study that comes out. Be skeptical about most health-related ones, for example. (Broccoli is bad for you! Now it's good for you! Now it causes cancer! Now it kills cancer! Now it is cancer!) A single study doesn't prove much of anything. But when thousands of studies have been done, and all of them support something like global warming or evolution, you should probably start to think "hmm. There might be something to this. Maybe I don't exactly understand it, but maybe if very smart people who study it for a living all agree on it, well, it could be true!"

The global warming conspiracy theorists especially get to me. It's clearly such a serious problem, and these jackasses are still refusing to face it. I'm very scared, personally. I just read, for example, that photosynthesis decreases dramatically at temperatures above 86 degrees. That means plants can't grow nearly as well when it gets hotter. I think is a more serious problem than whether Obama may at some point raise taxes on the rich.

But the global warming naysayers apparently think it's all some kind of grand conspiracy by scientists. Have these idiots ever met a scientist? Scientists are all arrogant, super-argumentative assholes (present company excepted). They live to tear down other scientists' ideas. Bad concepts would not survive a day in that kind of pressure cooker.

And how exactly would this conspiracy work? Do you think all of the millions of scientists occasionally meet in some underground bunker and go "OK, lets make up something new. How about that the planet is getting hotter? Yeah, that's so crazy it just might work! Now all we have to do is write thousands of papers and keep an incredible internal discipline among the millions of us. All so we can write books that no one reads and Al Gore can make a moderately successful movie! It's pure genius! And besides, without global warming, what would we all do for a living? After all, there are is no other science to study."

This gets at a general distrust that Americans seem to have of experts. I don't get it. We refuse to believe the conclusions of people who are spend all their time studying something that we know nothing about. Wouldn't you think they might come up something more valid than we would?

Why do Americans think that they can have a valid opinion on everything, just by following their own gut feelings? Sometimes, you don't know enough to form an opinion. Sometimes, you have to assume that the experts are not completely insane, that they might have explored the issue in such depth that they might know more than you about it. I know, I'm talking crazy talk. After all, I work hard at the shop and support my family, so don't go telling me that protein kinases add phosphate groups to proteins! I know in my heart that what they really do is help angels fly.

And hopefully that got us back to religion vs. science, which is where I meant to go with all of this. My point was that the Bible doesn't even try to get into science. It gets into history and ethics, but not science. It doesn't say how God did stuff, just that he did. It doesn't say "And God made man, and he did it with a big ZAP and puff of smoke, in like, a second." Why couldn't He have sparked the genetic mutations that led to the formation of humans, etc.? If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. Why can't God work through the physical world to do His thing?

Basically, religion isn't about how things happen. Science explores how. Religion is about why things happen, and by whom. Science doesn't have anything to say about the deeper meaning of our lives, and doesn't pretend to. Science doesn't set forth moral principles, because that's not its job. Religion and science are working on completely different sets of questions.

I suppose this false religion vs. science dichotomy came about because of all the lame explanations that people spun out of religious worldviews and then accepted as holy fact. For instance, they once concluded that the Earth was at the center of the universe, because we're all so wonderfully delightful and God loves us mucho and everything. So when Galileo realized that that wasn't true, the religious authorities came down on him hard. But note that the Bible doesn't say anything about the Earth being at the center of the universe. This was just something people made up before there was science, and then awkwardly tied in to religion.

Or take the creation story, which is at the heart of current religion vs. science talk. Yes, it does actually say that God created everything, including humans, in six days. But c'mon, is that really the most important point here? The point is that God created things. As I said in my last post, people who take the Bible literally would have to also believe that it's OK to beat your slave within an inch of his life.

Do you really think God is up there saying "Yup, six days. If you don't believe that, then go to hell! Literally." I think He's more concerned with people believing in him, and knowing that He loves them. That seems to be more His bag.

Or with global warming - what do you think Jesus would say about it? Seriously. Do you think he would say, "Naw, it ain't true, because I saw this one thing on Fox News that said it was all a lie." I think Jesus would be a lot more interested in the moral dimension of it. That's more His thing. I think Jesus would be more like "You guys really should not be consuming so much that you're threatening to destroy my creation. How about living a bit more simply? It worked for me."

So let's stop assuming that religion and science are somehow at odds. They're not. They're in completely different realms, asking and answering completely different questions.

What the World Needs Now Is Plague, Sweet Plague

The real problem with the world today is that there are too many damn people. The human population is increasing exponentially, and I’m not sure how long the planet can sustain us. A good plague would solve that. Maybe it could kill off a few billion people and get us to a more manageable level.

But I wouldn’t want it to affect anyone I know. Or any countries that I like. Maybe it should happen in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there, I don’t know much about it, and I know it’s crazy overcrowded. I certainly have nothing against Bangladesh, but you gotta start somewhere.

But that won’t work, will it. Wiping out Bangladesh wouldn’t be nearly enough, because the way the human population is expanding, we would replace the Bangladeshianians within a matter of years.

Hm, maybe it would be better just to make a whole bunch of people infertile. That would work better. And no one who’s alive would have to die, so it would be a lot less cruel, too. Sure, it would be very sad for people who always wanted to have kids but can’t, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few dreams.

Why am I talking this crazy talk, you ask? Well, it’s all a load of crap, to be sure, but it does get at something I’m seriously concerned about. I am perpetually frightened for our species. Eventually, one way or another, there will just be too damn many of us for this planet to handle. We’re going to outstrip our environment somehow. Any species growing as fast as we are is trouble, and that’s trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for “catastrophe.”

My worries are based in well-accepted science, thank you very much. See, the world is made up hundred zillion little ecosystem cycles in the natural world, all carefully balanced, all interacting with each other. Having one species come out of nowhere and dominate can ruin everything. A wolf that becomes too good at killing deer will eventually eat up all the deer and then have no more food source.

The point is that too much success can ruin a species, and while we may be one hell of a smart species, we’re subject to the same rules. In the history of the natural world, extinction is common, and we’re not immune from it. This is seriously how I look at things. I am lots of fun to be around, let me tell you.

But I honestly don’t think it’s that crazy of a perspective. Like it or not, we do depend on natural cycles for survival. Granted, the wolf example isn’t a great one, because we're probably not going to run out of food for ourselves too soon. We have sorta made our own little ecosystems that are under our control, through agriculture and animal husbandry. So in one sense, we solved the problem. But now the greenhouse gases that we pump into the atmosphere are fucking things up. So we’re back to threatening ourselves with our own success.

Sometimes I look at global warming this way: Think of the world as an organism (this perspective, by the way, is known as the Gaia hypothesis). All large organisms have other little organisms inside them. Humans have tons of little amoebae and paramecia and who the hell knows what else inside us, swimming around and not really affecting us one way or another. Most are harmless, but occasionally you get a nasty one, and then you get a disease.

Humans, and indeed all other species, are microbes within this Earth organism. All other species, so far, have not affected the Earth one way or another. But now the human species is becoming a virulent little mofo. We’re expanding rapidly and taking over the Earth, much the way a virus expands rapidly within a host and takes over. The Earth responds by raising its surface temperature, much the way we get fevers. The point of a fever is to make the place inhospitable for the bug, to essentially kill it off.

That’s what global warming is for, to kill us off. It’s the Earth’s own self-regulating mechanism for doing what I was talking about before, getting our species to a more manageable, sustainable level.

Normally, plagues are good for this sort of thing, as I mentioned above. They’re the Earth’s white blood cells, keeping a population down before it can go past a tipping point into becoming dangerous. But we keep evolving these resistances to these plagues, through modern medicine. So the Earth’s only recourse is to turn up the heat and see what happens.

Of course, we’re talking in terms of geological time here. In geological time, our switch from harmlessness to virulence has been unbelievably fast, within the last 100 years or so. So the killing-off process will be similarly fast by geological time standards, but slow by our standards. Maybe temperatures will get hotter and hotter, and more and more parts of the world will become too hot to live in. Then those people will have to move somewhere, so they’ll crowd to the North.

Frankly, there’s plenty of open space in Canada and Russia, so we maybe actually have room for these folks. But like ecosystems, economies also work best when there’s a measure of stability. Think what crazy flux everything will be in if people have to abandon Texas en masse and move to Canada. Do you think the Canadians want about bunch of Texans around? Canadians are nice, but not that nice.

That’s a facile example, but you get the idea. We don’t know what kind of chaos that global warming is going to cause. It’s such a fundamental change that it will affect every aspect of our lives and our societies.

All this is why the environment is my number-one issue, and always has been. I’m not saying that what we’re doing to the planet will necessarily destroy it, but there’s the threat there of such widespread, cataclysmic change that will have ripple effects everywhere else, and that frightens the shit out of me. And frankly, it trumps everything else.

Take the Iraq War, for example. It’s very serious and very tragic, no doubt. But the human species has weathered serious, tragic wars before. I’m confident we can do it again, albeit with more scars and probably more wars to follow.

Meanwhile, our species has never faced something like global warming before, and I’m not so sure how well we’ll do. I’m sure we’ll survive in some form, but not the way we are now if we don’t make some serious changes fast. That’s scary. That could mean famines, economic collapses – who knows what.

This is why I’m a strident environmentalist – it’s totally self-interest. Or more precisely, interest in humanity. I don’t really give a crap about the planet per se. I give a crap about it because the species I love, human beings, depends on it for survival. It’s sort of like the fact that I care about the chair I’m sitting on. This chair doesn’t do much for me in itself, but if it were suddenly taken away, I’d fall and break my tailbone. I don’t want humanity to fall and break its collective tailbone. (OK, I took that too far.)

I’m not even that big on nature, exactly. It can look quite nice in small doses, but I find it looks best through the window of a comfortable hotel room. I’m not outdoorsy – I’m indoorsy. I can find my way around the indoors amazingly well, surviving only on the food and water I can forage together from refrigerators and food courts.

So yeah, I’ve been made soft by the comforts of modern life. I like them and I sure don’t want to give them up through some kind of man-made catastrophe that returns us to the Stone Age. So if we can make small changes now to stave off the big changes we might suffer down the road, I’m all for it. More solar panels and wind farms? Sure. Fuel-efficient cars? You betcha. Change to fluorescent bulbs? I’m on it. Maybe it’s a pain to make these adjustments, but it’s much better than the alternative. Granted, I don’t know what that alternative will be, but the odds are it won’t be pleasant.