Deep thoughts

To creatures that evolved on the African savanna, contemporary physicists' understanding of the world is preposterous. Physicists believe a whole lot of stuff that is pointless and ridiculous. I can't say that I understand it very well myself but after a lifetime of subscribing to Scientific American, and reading a few books along the way, I think I have a reasonable intuitive understanding of most of it, and how they got to their conclusions, enough to convince me that they're understanding is progressive.

"Progressive" is the most credit I can give because they will be the first to tell you that there is a whole lot about the world that still baffles them. In fact, they can't account for 95% of the mass-energy content of the universe. Furthermore, much of their current theoretical picture may turn out to be not quite right. Nevertheless they have gotten closer to the truth than ever before, and much of their arcane and counterintuitive knowledge must be correct in some sense because the Global Positioning System and microprocessors, among other technologies, work.

But the vast majority of people don't know anything about quantum chromodynamics or particle entanglement or the general theory of relativity, and if I tried to explain it to them they'd think it was insane. On the other hand I do know a lot about Christianity -- my uncle was a preacher, my mother taught Sunday school, and I went until I was 13. And let me tell you, it is absolutely ridiculous. I won't try to sum up quantum chromodynamics for you but I can sum up Christianity.

In the original version, at some time thousands of years in the past, there were two people in the world. They disobeyed God by eating a piece of fruit, so he condemned all of their descendants to pain and eternal torment after death. (Plain old death is the literal sentence in Genesis, but Christians came up with the idea of hell.) Many modern Christian sects, including the Catholic church, have stopped taking the story about the piece of fruit literally, but in a way that makes it even worse. Humans have been bearing the burden of Original Sin not just for 10,000 years, but for 300,000. (Not clear if Homo erectus had original sin.) Why we were burdened with Original Sin in this more modern telling is not specified.

 

Anyway, after 8,000 or 300,000 years, whichever you like, God decided to fix this situation. So he made a virgin pregnant with his son, who was also himself, and then had his son/self tortured to death except he didn't die, and now if you believe this you don't have to go to hell. If you don't believe it, however, you're still screwed. This was a rough deal for most of the world's people for the next 1,500 years or so, because they never had a chance to hear this story and therefore to believe it. 

 

But most people still don't believe this -- most of them adhere to other, equally ridiculous religions, and a few are like me.  And even the Christians think that most Christians are wrong about the whole thing in some way. There is no actual evidence for any of this, you're just supposed to believe one thing or another, usually whatever your parents told you when you were a child. 

The problem is, if you believe in a religion, you can believe anything. Believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election is like believing in the resurrection. You just believe it, doesn't matter that it's completely ridiculous. This is a problem. Science has given humanity such power that we absolutely must have a consensual understanding of reality if we are to save ourselves from ourselves. The only way out is through -- science and reason must prevail over superstition and motivated belief if we are to solve the multiple crises we've caused by giving ourselves so much power with too little wisdom. But we're getting there much too slowly.