The Final Frontier

As the brilliant Carl Sagan pointed out in his book Pale Blue Dot, religion and science are essentially at war, and actually they've been duking it out for over a thousand years. Interestingly, the main dispute does not encompass politics, natural resources or national boundaries as is usual in most wars. Instead the struggle is for the spiritual landscape of existence.

Christianity, and other one-God-based religions attest to the sanctity and permanence of the soul. It is taken as fact that humans are special and different from other lifeforms. The Bible also proclaims the importance of the Earth as the centerpiece of the universe, built for us to house our magnificence, as God's lesser clones.

Over the centuries as science has progressed, the human race has been able to explain more and more natural phenomena using simple, natural means. As our understanding of the universe grows, science claims more and more territory that was previously "unexplainable" as "explainable" or sometimes even: "not just explainable but also observable and testable".

In this way, science has been whittling away at the unexplainable world, a realm usually claimed by philosophy and especially religion. With each new scientific discovery or theory, science cuts out another swathe of intellectual space, extending the bounds of what it can reasonably explain. However this encroachment onto what some assume is sacred religious ground is not won easily.

The first major fender bender with religion occurred during the era of Copernicus and Galileo when they proposed that the Earth was not the center of our solar system. These were truly "heretical ideas" which were frowned upon by the religious leaders of the time. Over the centuries, this radical concept gained acceptance. The Earth was not the center of the Universe after all, the sun was.



So began what Carl Sagan calls "The Great Demotions." Later we discovered that even our solar system is not special, our sun is just one of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And in fact our galaxy is not special either, it is just one of billions of galaxies all flying away from each other in a giant explosion of galaxies resulting from the big bang. Each realization further shows that we exist on an arbitrary world amongst many in a vast wilderness of space.

And even now science has not stopped trying to demonstrate our true insignificance in the universe. With the recent discoveries of large planets that orbit distant stars, we have confirmed that our solar system is not the only one to harbor planets. Soon, we will begin discovering smaller Earth-size planets and show that there may be other Earths out there too.

Our recent explorations of Mars and our investigations of other stellar bodies in our solar system have uncovered rich geologic histories on par with Earth's. In the case of Mars, we have recently shown that water must have existed on the surface long ago, and scientists are formulating detailed and complicated histories of its geologic past. It is clear that time passes and history happens every day in other parts of the universe, despite our ignorance of events we can't see.



At the same time that we are confirming the unblessed nature of our planet in the universe, we are unraveling the human soul. There are barely any biological processes in the body that are currently unexplained. When Watson and Crick discovered the presence of DNA inside each cell's nucleus, they were able to explain what guides the creation and function of every cell in the body. We now know how just about every part of the human body operates, and how we grow from a single cell into creatures with numerous organs operating in harmony. Science is allowing us to explore the operation of the brain and discover what allows the human mind to create consciousness itself.

With our current understanding of physics, chemistry and biology, there is nothing in the universe or in our bodies that either already has a scientific explanation, or that science cannot be reasonably extrapolated to include. God's creation of the heavens is not necessary, we have the big bang and modern physics to explain the current shape of the universe. Souls are not strictly necessary, the physical operation of the human body and brain is explainable without a supernatural presence. Even the creation of life itself is explainable, thanks to Darwin.

And it is evolution, over a hundred years after being first proposed, that is still under attack by the religious masses. No single scientific theory stands to reclassify more territory in the "unexplainable" realm as "explainable." With evolution and the theory of origin of species, we can explain the existence of life as we know it on Earth. If humans evolved from single-cell organisms, and the cell developed from other self-replicating structures, and these structures were created accidentally (a conceivable idea) on our primordial Earth long ago, we don't need the notion that a supernatural being (whose origins are unexplainable) created us.

There is so much overwhelming evidence for evolution that it seems like pure insanity that anyone would propose teaching intelligent design in schools. There is just no need to superimpose a supernatural, mystical savior of humankind over a consistent and rational scientific model of the world, which exists perfectly by itself. And despite creationist arguments, there is no evidence against the theory of evolution except for anomalies that occasionally come up due to minor accuracy problems in radioactive-dating methods. The bottom line anyway is that in science class, only science should be taught. And pardon me but theories that involve supernatural beings is not science.

What we have now is a universe that is almost totally within the realm of scientific explanation. Except for the stimulus of the big bang, and our persistent internal perceptions of consciousness, we don't really need a supernatural being at all any more to answer life's questions.

However God is still performing the important tasks of providing moral guideance and saving souls so unfortunately I doubt we'll see an end to people's need for God anytime soon.