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I admit to my share of regrets, though I’ve had
blessedly little experience with outright shame. I prefer to think
this is not because I’m a sociopath but that we all learn to avoid
things that are unpleasant. Still, like whacking your thumb with a
hammer, it can happen anyway.
The scene was a lecture by a geologist who has written
several books on the earth’s history and his best guess as to how it
will end. It was well presented and entertaining – not my general
experience with college professors – but otherwise standard fare.
You’ve heard it: The big bang, life developed by
evolution, dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid, global warming is
upon us, the earth will fry when the sun expands, and so on. It was
pretty much a rote exercise in the scientific guesses du jour until
a man in the audience asked about the impact of religion on
mankind.
Now a scientist has as much right to religious views as
the next person but I have no idea why you’d pose this question to
one in his capacity as a geologist. The only theology in stone I
know of is the Ten Commandments, and it hadn’t come up.
I suspect the questioner hoped the answer would give
scientific heft to some personal resentment; if so, he wasn’t
disappointed. Geologically speaking, it turns out that religion is
a threat to human survival and the root of countless evils.
I sat in silence, letting it pass unchallenged, my
cheeks burning red. It is a simple task to whip up examples of harm
done in the name of God, but blaming God or religion per se requires
a gross misunderstanding of human nature. I should have said it.
We are, in a word, selfish; some would say sinful,
though “selfish” is a fair secular approximation. Infants enter the
world as a bundle of needs, unequipped with the slightest sympathy
for those who tend them (ask any new parent after a few dozen nights
of beck-and-call bottle duty). Selfishness is a survival skill for
newborns, and they have little trouble making their wants known.
Parents must satisfy those needs, but eventually wean
their children from first milk, then dependence. The good ones
instill values in the process, emotional add-ons like compassion and
empathy. Most parents have seen this principle at work, as well as
what happens when it doesn’t.
Not everyone makes the break from self-centeredness; I’d
argue that none of us do completely. Those in whom it stays strong
will grasp at any justification, including religion, race, political
ideology, and gender.
You know the results, the political wars and racial
atrocities that scorched the last century. History’s greatest
slaughter came at the hands of the atheist Joseph Stalin, whose name
is stained with the blood of 20 million. Those who think science’s
hands are clean ignore the sordid exploits of Josef Mengele at
Auschwitz and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the United States,
where researchers allowed black men to rot of syphilis just to see
what would happen.
It stretches credulity to believe these thugs would have
been upstanding citizens if not for science and politics. You still
wouldn’t have wanted Hitler, Stalin, or Mengele for neighbors
because their hearts would have been just as wicked.
I know this. I didn’t say it when it might have
mattered, though I did ask the professor to predict what theories he
and his peers would be flogging as the new truth in 30 years.
Virtually everything he had mentioned except evolution – the big
bang, extinction by asteroid, global warming – has become “fact”
only in the last couple of decades. I don’t doubt my grandchildren
will hear yet other versions.
When they do, I hope they’ll be bolder than I. Science
clearly has a part in advancing knowledge, but holds no franchise on
truth.
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