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Non-Fiction
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| Thank God | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 20 February 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Oh, I am going to regret this so much Thank God I’m not an atheist. I believe. I am also a scientist (well, not actually a scientist, but a follower of science). The mistake many people on both sides of the argument make is thinking that the two are in any way related. That there is in fact only one argument. It is possible to believe in Intelligent Design as well as Evolution. One is the why, the other the how. They are unrelated, which is why the scientific community (by definition intelligent and logical) is made up of believers, agnostics and atheists. It is as arrogant and misguided to use science to disprove religion as it is for religion to disprove science. But if I were an atheist, oh what an atheist I would make. I would pursue the logic of atheism with a scientific zeal. For this, it seems to me, is the reasoning of the logical atheist I would be. In a Godless world, everything boils down to physics and chemistry. Certain compounds react so with other compounds. Some have an affinity for others. And as they mix and congeal over millennia the more stable reactions persevere. Some compounds generate a boundary layer inside which the reactions are isolated. These we shall call cells, for want of a better label. How many cells formed and dissolved in the turmoil of the primeval soup, before one accidentally produced a self-sustaining chemical reaction that resulted in its twin growing, like a crystal growing in a salt solution? And in time, the reactions became more complicated, and more long-lived, and more self-sustaining. It is simple logic. If two chemicals burn side by side, but because of the environment one gutters and dies, that is the end of the reaction. This in a nutshell is evolution, and scientifically is the best, most logical theory we have. So Mankind is merely a chemical reaction, different from a burning coal or candle only in the complexity of its reactions. Thought is just tiny electrical pulses skittering through a medium like Brownian smoke particles trapped in air. There is no God, there is only the laws of physics and chemistry. Society is an illusion. A coal fire burns better if the coals are heaped together. Similarly, the human coals burn when organized into a co-operative group. There is neither good nor bad. ‘Good’ is a pattern of electrical currents that are more likely to be sustainable than another pattern (let’s call those patterns ‘bad’). If a candle burns better away from a draught, do we lay upon the draught a burden of moral impropriety? Is the draught ‘bad’? Is the still air ‘good? Morality is a delusion. If a candle gutters and dies, is there moral outrage? Do we condemn the other candle that stole its oxygen? Why should we care if another candle burns well, or burns at all? If lightning that strikes a thousand miles away hits one millimetre to the left or right, should I be bothered? Then why should I be bothered if a tiny current goes down one path (let’s call that ‘happiness’) or another (signposted ‘misery’). It is merely physics after all, and stronger electrical currents are coursing the seas and skies all the time. Art, religion, philosophy? Just words to describe certain electrical patterns, so confused and arbitrary no-one can agree on them. Love, hate, emotion? Imposters all. In the right mix, they are electrical currents and chemical messages that survive better than other mixes. Rights? What rights? Does salt dissolving into a river have rights? Does a candle have a right to consume oxygen? Does the oxygen have a right not to be consumed? Rights are the label we give to those circumstances that prolong our chemistry. Do we even have a right to exist? Of course not. No more than any other reaction. Certainly no more than any reaction we label ‘life’. How are we different from the tomato or the lettuce we eat? Why should man alone have rights that other phenomena don’t? What’s the point? What’s the point of breathing, of living? Why not snuff our flame out? But that is to miss the point. Survival and suicide are equally pointless. We have evolved to survive simply because that is the process that burns the best. And soon, ever sooner, the candle will have consumed all the available resources, and like a forest fire will eventually burn itself out. Till then, we burn, passing the flame onto the next generation, mindlessly, helplessly, because that’s what this particular chemical reaction does. Is there a God? What is the point if there is not?
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Although I sometimes forget that myself :P Science and religion cannot explain each other. A certain special person in my live, who's a wonderful scientist AND a devout catholic put it simply: When she is doing science, she doesn't ask about religion. When she's in church, she doesn't care about science.
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