Read Online Science of Discworld III by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page A

mechanism.
    To their credit, proponents of intelligent design are encouraging this kind of debate, but they have not yet conceded defeat, even though their entire programme rests on shaky foundations and is collapsing in ruins. Creationists, desperate to snatch at any straw of scientific respectability for their political programme to lever religion into the American state school system, 5 have not yet noticed that what they are currently taking as their scientific support is falling apart at the seams. The theory of intelligent design itself is not overtly theist – indeed its proponents try very hard not to draw religious conclusions. They want the scientific arguments to be considered as science. Of course that’s not going to happen, because the theist implications are a little too obvious – even to atheists.
    There are some things that evolution does not explain – which will gladden the heart of anyone who feels that, Darwin notwithstanding, there are some issues that science cannot address.
    It is perfectly possible to agree with Darwin and his successors that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that life has evolved, by purely physical and chemical processes, from inorganic beginnings – yet still find a place for a deity. Yes, in a rich and complex universe, all these things can happen without divine intervention. But … how did that rich and complex universe come into being?
    Here, today’s cosmology offers descriptions of how (Big Bang, various recent alternatives) and when (about 13 billion years ago), but not why. String theory, a recent innovation at the frontiers of physics, makes an interesting attempt at ‘why?’ However, it leaves an even bigger ‘why?’ unanswered: why string theory? Science develops the consequences of physical rules (‘laws’), but it doesn’t explain why those rules apply, or how such a set-up came to exist.
    These are deep mysteries. At the moment, and probably for ever, they are not accessible to the scientific method. Here religions come into their own, offering answers to riddles about which science chooses to remain mute.
    If you want answers, they are available.
    Rather a lot of different ones, in fact. Choose whichever one makes you feel most comfortable.
    Feeling comfortable, however, is not a criterion recognised by science. It may make us feel warm and fuzzy, but the historical development of scientific understanding shows that, time and again, warm and fuzzy is just a polite way of saying ‘wrong’.
    Belief systems rely on faith, not evidence. They provide answers – but they don’t provide any rational process to assess those answers. So although there are questions beyond the capacity of science to answer, that’s mostly because science sets itself high standards for evidence, and holds its tongue when there isn’t any. The alleged superiority of belief systems compared to science, when it comes to these deep mysteries, stems not from a failure of science, but from the willingness of belief systems to accept authority without question.
    So the religious person can take comfort that his or her beliefs provide answers to deep questions of human existence that are beyond the powers of science, and the atheist can take comfort that there is absolutely no reason to expect those answers to be right. But also no way to prove them wrong, so why don’t we just coexist peacefully, stay off each other’s turf, and each get on with our own thing? Which is easy to say but harder to do, especially when some people refuse to stick to their own turf, and use political means, or violence, to promote their views, when rational debate long ago demolished them.
    Some aspects of some belief systems are testable, of course – the Grand Canyon is not evidence for Noah’s flood, unless God is having a quiet joke at our expense, which admittedly would be a very Discworld thing to do. And if He is, then all bets are off, because His revealed word in [insert your preferred