If Your Spirituality Teaches You Gratitude, Then Say Thank You To Science - Now!

I came across this interesting list of ways in which "healthy" religion is supposed to differ from "unhealthy" religion.

Healthy and unhealthy religion (Click to expand) - but who's to say "no religion" isn't the healthiest of all?

It seems like a nice enough point of view, but as a rationalist, I simply cannot get past the very first question in my mind, "What is the evidence for these claims?"

As I thought more about this position (that there is a "healthy" way to be religious, as opposed to not being religious at all), I found myself getting a little angry, to be frank.

I was angry because I felt that the people espousing this point of view were being profoundly ungrateful. The very first point listed in that table was gratitude, and yet they were failing to show gratitude to the one thing that has improved their lives, and the lives of everyone on the planet.

That something is science.

Just take four specific examples.

These are my favourites - smartphones, cars, breakthroughs in medicine, and surgical techniques

Everyone uses or gets the benefits of these in their lives.

Everyone has a smartphone. The processing power of a modern phone is greater than that of a desktop computer just at the turn of the millennium. In terms of its functions, it can single-handedly replace a dozen earlier gadgets, and is so much handier to carry around.

"So you took our jobs?"

Cars have advanced so much in such a short time, and are getting better every year on dozens of parameters - fuel efficiency, environmental friendliness, ease of driving, safety, you name it. We are likely to have self-driving, fully-electric cars by 2030.

Tony Seba's talk on the future of energy and transportation is a classic

Everyone goes the doctor for medical treatment when they have an illness and they expect to be diagnosed and cured in short order. As I have mentioned earlier,

There are still many human ailments that elude a cure, but for which there are already glimmers of hope -- blindness, deafness, dementia, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, paralysis, AIDS, cancer, Ebola, -- the list only grows.

AI is getting better at diagnosis, and it often surpasses the capabilities of human doctors.

If someone has a serious ailment that requires more drastic intervention, they can rely upon advanced surgical techniques to cure them, more quickly and painlessly than was possible in earlier years. Keyhole surgery is now available for many more conditions than ever before, and patients can often go home the same day. Robot-assisted surgeries are becoming commonplace. In the future, robots will take over surgeries entirely.

My position is that all of these enormously beneficial breakthroughs have come about because of investments in hard science. Workers at smartphone factories do not sit around praying until smartphones fall into their laps. There is a lot of hard science - electronics, mainly - that goes into making them ever smaller and more powerful. Physics is hard at work, solving multiple constraints and barriers, and the results are there before us. Remember what phones used to look like just a few years ago?

The pace of change has been breathtaking

The same is true for all the other areas as well. It's investment in hard science that delivers results, not prayer or woolly-headed belief in spirituality.

I'm particularly angry with the modern tendency to exploit science while enjoying the luxury of spirituality. If a loved one has a serious illness, people will not neglect to take them to hospital and get them the best medical care. And yet, if their loved ones recover, they will thank "god" or a higher power. If they don't recover, they will blame the doctor or the hospital. This strikes me as dishonest and ungrateful.

I believe people who fail to acknowledge their debt to science, and who further claim that some "spiritual" entity is responsible for all their blessings, are spitting in the plate they eat from.

It's particularly galling that these are the very people who make such a fetish of the notion of gratitude.

If gratitude is what you claim your spiritualism has taught you, then express your gratitude to science! By "express your gratitude", I don't mean the "spiritual" way of expressing gratitude, which is to bow one's head, close one's eyes and murmur "thank you". It means to walk the talk of science, to acknowledge through action the engine that drives science - rational thinking. Science is not so much a body of knowledge as a way of thinking. It is rational thinking that makes us scientific, not advanced degrees. Indeed, we see so many sloppy thinkers with advanced degrees that the need to get back to basics has never been more urgent.

So start practising science and rationalism in your own lives! Stop accepting ideas that are not backed up by evidence! You will be doing yourself and others a huge favour. And you will be an intellectually and morally honest person.

Modern Medical Miracles

I believe we are on the cusp of a new Golden Age, and this article supports my feeling. Go ahead and read it, but these were the bits that stood out for me:

Imagine the leaps we can make as a species if we [lived to 150]. In the early 1900s, for example, life expectancy was 30, so inventors, artists, scientists and engineers reached their peak in their twenties. Today, those same people (sic!) are at their prime in their forties and fifties. [...] But imagine [...] if they were able to carry on inventing and discovering for another 30 or 40 years. The Renaissance may have been a direct result of the development of reading glasses. which enabled older people to participate in a way that they couldn't before because their eyes were not working properly.

You can say that again. My late father's brain was as alert and active at age 80 as it was in his younger days, but he had to give up reading and translating Japanese because his eyesight was a lot worse.

A professor is working on "quantum dots" - microscopic, photosensitive flecks of silicone that could one day be used to "inject" new information into the brain and provide non-invasive treatment for Alzheimer's, epilepsy and blindness.

And autism, hopefully.

He and his team had managed to put mice into a state of suspended animation using hydrogen sulphide. [...] A mouse that had been fully suspended has no heartbeat, but the cells have also stopped dying. After six hours, Roth was able to bring it "back to life". [...] Trying to get the medical community on board would be challenging, though, Roth admits. He thinks inducing a partially suspended state ("dimming the lights rather than turning them out completely") would be more acceptable.

I think the human race has a skewed sense of ethics. We worry about the naturalness of new things, right from the earliest view of medicine as interfering with the suffering that God has purportedly willed for us, to today's debates about stem cell therapy. Influenced by my background in IT, I view the human being as nothing more than software running on hardware, - an electro-chemical consciousness (or "state" in IT terms) running on complex, but fragile, organic hardware. That's why I don't believe there is a mystical "soul", and why I have no moral qualms about messing around with hardware, swapping parts, suspending system state, and the like. Anything to keep the operating system stable and running, because that's what we are :-).

If we were to take [hydrogen sulphide] at night, to suspend instead of sleep for example, would we live twice as long?

Make it available at my chemist, and I'll buy it :-).

He needs an organ transplant, so Satava instructs the computer built into the surgical robot to print one using the soldier's stem cells. [...] because there was no internet connection in the middle of the desert, they used a transponder on an unmanned aerial vehicle hovering overhead.

Of course, it's got to be for soldiers first! The military must always come before the civilian. What's really obscene about our civilisation is how the improvement of our peacetime lives is so often just a spin-off from the improvement in our ability to kill each other.

Chizeck says they're also working on creating "no fly zones" around certain anatomical structures that a surgeon doesn't want to touch.

Yup, it would be great if organs not involved in a surgical procedure could be "greyed out" so a remote surgeon couldn't accidentally "click" on them and do damage.

In short, we are all IT people now. Banking and financial services are nothing but computer systems these days, and often some systems guy knows the business logic better than the business executives themselves. It'll be cool if someday a nerd in a computer room somewhere knows more about surgery than the surgeons themselves...