For my last birthday, a close friend bought me a year’s membership to the Royal Institution. One of the major achievements of the RI is the weekly science talks, all pitched squarely at a level accessible to the general public, and thus giving me a fighting chance of grasping at least part of the content. Last night I finally managed to tear myself away from the Xbox long enough to attend one of these events.
American physicist, writer and pseudo-science debunker Bob Park gave a talk on Superstition: Belief in the time of science, with the aim of explaining why 90% of the population still clings to superstition (i.e., religion), when causality – the idea that every observable event has a physical, not supernatural, cause – was proposed 2,500 years ago and has done a pretty good job of explaining the universe ever since. Unfortunately, I felt Park ultimately fell short of this goal. He occasionally touched on reasons why religion persists, even prospers, despite the complete lack of supporting evidence (e.g., the psychological need for humans to create Gods, how our lifestyle and environment has changed far more rapidly than our brains can evolve, etc.) but it felt more like a loose collection of ideas rather than a coherent argument.
I think part of the problem was that Park stuck solely to presenting the science and presumed that the implications were obvious. Well, sometimes it’s good to explicitly state the obvious, just to be sure your message is hammered home, straight and true. For instance, Park spent a good chunk of his time responding to the argument oft-cited by believers that God must exist as all humans are intrinsically moral. He took the Ten Commandments and reduced them down to “Know who’s the boss” (God is your Lord; You shall have no other Gods; Don’t make graven images; Don’t take God’s name in vain), and “Do unto others as you would have do unto you” (Thou shalt not: Steel, kill, lie, adulter or covet wifes/asses). Thus all of the Christian moral code can basically be summarised as reciprocity. And that’s where he stopped. I know that elsewhere he’s argued that reciprocity gives a distinct survival advantage (a group of animals working together as a pack has a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce than a lone beast), and thus is a simple product of evolution and not some divine imprint. But last night that was left for us to conclude on our own. If time was the issue then he could have easily skipped over the in-depth discussion of a medical trial which concluded prayer has no measurable impact on patient’s health: Surely that one’s a no-brainer.
Despite failing somewhat to meet expectations, it was nevertheless a great evening: Park has a warm, laid-back style, a wide range of witty anecdotes at his disposal and is just an all-round likeable guy. Though I guess it helps that his opinions mesh almost one-to-one with my own…
