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.

Water, Water, Everywhere

I found this really good "infographic" on the net. Click on it to expand.

The diagram refers to a coming crisis of drinking water for a large part of the world's population, but paradoxically, this picture gives me a lot of hope - because it shows that we're nowhere near the end of our potential supply of water! We're currently able to access 1% of the world's supply of freshwater, which in turn is just 2.5% of all the water in the world. There's plenty more where what we have today came from.

Technology is all that stands in the way of our being able to tap into the remainder, and there are a zillion technological ways to skin this cat. One simple idea that has been around for decades is desalination. Economics is the only practical barrier to desalination, and a large part of this is the cost of energy per unit of water processed. Again and again, it comes back to energy. Now, I believe the world is on the cusp of an energy revolution, so with cheap and plentiful energy, many more things will become possible. Safe drinking water for all will be just one of them.

Sense and Scientific Culpability

It appears a major tremor has gone through the scientific community, especially in Italy, after a group of scientists were sentenced to six years in jail and a hefty fine after failing to warn of the risk of an earthquake.

Several scientists and officials have resigned in protest, saying it is now impossible for them to do their jobs if they are likely to be punished for being wrong in a highly inexact science like seismology.

While I have some sympathy for that view, it isn't that cut-and-dried. My view is that while the sentence is too harsh, the scientists were indeed to blame in this case.

The seven convicted were all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks. The members of a body with such an unambiguous name surely understand that the public is relying on their expert opinion to make decisions that impact their lives.

The panel was explicitly convened at the request of the Civil Protection Agency in response to warnings of an impending earthquake. It should have been clear to the scientists that an opinion was being sought from them, and that this opinion would influence the decisions of many people.

The actual sequence of events seems very clear and damning:

1. According to the minutes of the meeting, the scientists never said there was no danger of a big quake. Volcanologist Franco Barberi said, accurately: "There is no reason to believe that a swarm of minor events is a sure predictor of a major shock." So far, the scientists are in the clear.
2. However, after the meeting, Bernardo De Bernardinis from the Civil Protection Agency walked out and addressed the press: "The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favourable." Now this was not a true representation of what was actually said at the meeting by the scientists.
3. At the trial and after, the scientists have said that the responsibility for the tragedy lies with De Bernardinis, who made the  "no danger" statement.
4. But according to the prosecutor (and I agree with him), regardless of who made the statement, the scientists on the committee are culpable for failing to correct it promptly. They allowed an incorrect summary of their discussion to be passed to the public as their expert opinion and did not correct it with alacrity. This was highly negligent of them and they failed in their fiduciary duty to the public.

That's why I believe the ruling against the scientists is justified, although the sentence could perhaps be watered down a bit.

What now? Will this ruling have a chilling effect on science in general? 

Some are already saying so.

Just imagine the world with scientists saying, 'no thank you, we're not available, we will not being doing anymore of our job'.

The Corriere della Sera daily said in a front page editorial:

The most worrying thing is that from now on, there will not be a single expert willing to join the commission because they know they could face very heavy criminal convictions for not having been able to predict a disastrous quake.

But this is not a conviction for failing to get the science right! It's a conviction for failing to get the message right. Those who have their knickers in a knot over this case probably haven't understood what exactly the scientists are being accused of.

And really now, how is this any different from a medical malpractice suit? Every time someone sues a doctor or a hospital for negligence, the medical community closes ranks. But they don't say that doctors will stop practising. They usually raise the bogey of higher medical care costs because of the rise in insurance premiums to cover public liability and professional indemnity. [Well, ooga-booga! We're not scared.]

It seems society is always held to ransom by powerful guilds. The moral of the story is that with every position of authority comes responsibility, and no one should be allowed to duck that.

How Can We Trust Science?

I'm all for the rationalist approach to life. I would like to have science rule my actions and my thinking. But in practice, science often leaves me feeling cheated.

Last year, a glass of red wine a day was good for me. It was rich in antioxidants, which helped to fight cancer.

This year, even two small glasses of red wine a day can cause ... cancer.

Thinking scientifically therefore, the act of pouring wine into smaller glasses seems to be what introduces carcinogens into the system.

Come back, religion and superstition, all is forgiven!

The Ascent of Man

I recently bought the BBC series "The Ascent of Man" on DVD. This is a 13-part series on the evolution of human civilisation, presented and narrated by Jacob Bronowski. What brings back a rush of nostalgic memories is the fact that I saw this series when I was a boy, and I'm thankful for the eclectic, science-oriented upbringing I was privileged to have.

My father was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, and I grew up on the campus. It was a small, cosy campus and a teenager could walk from one end to the other quite easily. I've done that countless times, climbing over the back walls of departments in the evenings looking for "treasure". My friends and I (all children of faculty) took great pleasure in raiding the dumps outside the chemistry departments (there were three of them, - Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry and Biochemistry, - and Organic Chemistry was our favourite). We would scavenge half-used bottles of benzene and similar chemicals and take them home to do experiments. (Did you know that thermocol dissolves in benzene with a most satisfying fizz?)

My dad was quite indulgent and would chuckle about my "experiments" when he walked into a room reeking of recently-burnt plastic or some such. I doubt if I'd let my son do such dangerous experiments today (we've lost the element of risk-taking in today's world, as I mentioned in another post).

We were a group of nerds, I realise now. I don't know what ambitions normal kids used to have, but my close campus friends and I knew what we were going to do - we were going to become scientists and cure cancer, winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine in the process. And we knew exactly how we were going to do it, too. Just inject cancer cells into squirrels, then extract the cancerous growths, dry them to "weaken" the cells, and inject them into healthy people. Voila! A cancer vaccine! (I think it was better for humanity that the two young geniuses who thought of that ended up in the software industry instead.)

They used to hold educational film shows some evenings in some of the departments, and a whole lot of professors' kids used to turn up at these. One of these educational shows was "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, which I found a bit boring at the time, but which I think I would like to see now. Another one was "The Ascent of Man". I remember this series quite vividly. The wireframe computer graphics shown seemed highly advanced in the seventies. Now I have a chance to see the series again, and I'm able to understand it much, much better. Jacob Bronowski is a genius. He can tie together science, technology, history, economics and a bunch of different disciplines and tell a convincing story of how we came about. (He's no more, but I feel like referring to him in the present tense because I'm still watching the series).

I would recommend "The Ascent of Man" to anyone interested in science. And I'm once again grateful for a weird and wonderful childhood spent in the innocence of scientific exploration.