Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Marcelo Gleiser (13.7 Cosmos & Culture, NPR.org)
The
experience would mark me for the rest of my life and set a new
professional goal that I had not anticipated early in my career: to
bring science to the largest number of people possible.
(Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images) |
The interviewer asked me questions about the scientific take on the end of the world, inspired by a book I had just published called The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World.
There are many ways in which science can address this question. We can see, from the devastating effects of Typhoon Haiyan, that the forces of nature are beyond our control, even if we pride ourselves on "taming" the world around us.
But
the focus of my book was on cataclysmic celestial events and how they
have inspired both religious narratives and scientific research, past
and present. In particular, note the many instances that stars and fire
and brimstone fall from the sky in the Bible, both in the Old (e.g.,
Book of Daniel, Sodom and Gomorrah) and the New Testament (e.g.,
Apocalypse of John), or how the Celts believed that the skies would fall
on their heads to mark the end of a time cycle.
God's handiwork? The devastating effects of Typhoon Haiyan (fastcompany.com) |
A priest of the new religion |
Back to the
interview, I mentioned how the collision with a six-mile-wide asteroid
that hit the Yucatan Peninsula of modern-day Mexico had [allegedly] triggered the
extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
I made a point of
explaining how that event changed the history of life on Earth, freeing
the small mammals of the time from predator pressure and culminating
with the evolution of humans. My point was that there is no need for
divine intervention to explain these very essential episodes in our
planetary and collective history.
It was then that the hand
went up. A small man with torn clothes and grease stains on his face
asked: "So the doctor wants to take even God away from us?"
I
froze. The despair in that man's voice was apparent. He felt betrayed.
His faith was the only thing he held on to, the only thing that gave him
strength to come back to that bus station every day to work for a
humiliatingly low minimum wage.
Jesus and Vishnu on a cloud ("Family Guy") |
If I took God away and put in
its place the rational argumentation of science, with its empirical
validation, what would that even mean to this man? How would it help him
go on with his life? How could science teach him to cope with life in a
world without the magic of supernatural belief?
I realized
then how far scientists are from the needs of most people; how far
removed our discourse is from those who do not already seek science for
answers, as surely most of you reading this essay already do. And I
realized that, in order to reach a larger audience, to bring the wonders
of science to a much larger slice of the population, we must... More
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