The bones of belief

Edge, an online publication, has posed the following question, a question it believes to be rather a good one, a BURNING one, judging from the pompous motivational quotes in attendance. It also seems to believe it is putting this rather well-turned question to an audience that is not totally out of kilter with all the answers to everything you might want to know about life, the universe and everything, namely the BBC, the New York Times, "culture scientists" and "science-minded thinkers".

The question is this: "What do you believe to be true, even though you cannot prove it?"

What I find hilarious is that, after ramming down the throats of the sullen masses the precepts of empirical observation and inference, and doggedly scrubbing the sheen of belief off all modern people, reducing them to provable reality (or rather, not yet unproved, most-likely "reality") the scientific community now wants to acquire an interest in faith. I don`t believe (and I can`t prove this) that it is the province of science to intrude any further on the domain of faith. After destroying it, they should at best glass-cage it and leave it alone, for children, mystics, visionaries and madmen to gaze at its bones.

Maybe I should cut them some slack. Maybe a paradigm that moves only within the observable, kept in place by little minds without imagination or understanding or hope, can hope to acquaint itself with the beatific lot in that place where the truth can be known, but not seen. I don`t want to be there when it happens. It`ll be a blast, I`m sure, but I`m just as sure there will be issues to work through.

Scientists are not the thought leaders they`re cracked up to be, and you`ll know why I say that when I quote from the site. A bunch of science-minded "thinkers" supplied Edge with their ramblings about the meaning of it all, which is really best left to philosophers, writers and yes, mystics and spiritualists.

Here`s what one Craig Venter (no, not THE Craig Venter), a genomics researcher, has to say: "[I believe] life is ubiquitous throughout the universe. Life on our planet earth most likely is the result of a panspermic* event (a notion popularised by the late Francis Crick). Our human-centric view of life is clearly unwarranted. From the millions of genes that we have just discovered in environmental organisms over the past months we learn that a finite number of themes are used over and over again and could have easily evolved from a few microbes arriving on a meteor or on intergalactic dust. Panspermia is how life is spread throughout the universe and we are contributing to it from earth by launching billions of microbes into space."

My response to this is: Who cares? Somebody asks you what you believe, and this is what you come up with? Not something satirical, like "I believe the children are our future", or something quite important, like "I believe what I hate in others are really the very things I fear within myself", or even something truly mind-blowing, like "I believe humans possess the ambition, but not the ability, to rise above their insignificance and that, at most, we can but dabble in lesser pursuits of the observable to flatter our suspicion of self-importance"?

Others like Venter pursue the same dogged, linear format in their declaration of "belief". Ian Wilmut (biologist) reckons: "I believe that it is possible to change adult cells from one phenotype to another." While some may find this wildly exhilarating and important, I don`t think it is in any way significant at all.

Somebody asks you what you believe, and this is what you come up with?

Carel Alberts, Special editions editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

Nothing that might increase my longevity, looks, intelligence, pheromone secretion, acceptability by people who listen to Britney Spears, or my smell is important. Science is, in fact, not important in any true sense. I like it, it`s fine, it`s clever, but then I`m not so much after merely liking something merely fine, other than possibly a thing of the order of a basalt statuette several millennia old. I`m not that interested in things or people who are merely clever either. If they, however, radiate with the beauty of spirit or creative fury, or have a mind that sets its own rules, one that is yet troubled by its limitations, now that would be interesting.

So, what I believe, in short, is the following: I believe (without being able to prove it) that human nature is not really all that fantastic, to be honest. We could be more honest and less political. We need not regard ourselves as the finished article. We`re not the makers of our own destiny. We cannot make any of the important things, such as a bean, for instance. And yet we act, hopelessly, as though we`re gods, as though we`re interesting and all of us deserve to be on TV, as though, even though we cannot do everything or even very much, it doesn`t matter, because we`re all there is. We`re so wrong.

Panspermia

Panspermia, which literally means seeds everywhere, underlies the hypothesis that the biological stuff of life did not have its origins in terrestrial resources but in inter-stellar space. The theory maintains that life on the earth was seeded from space and that life`s evolution to higher forms depends on complex genes (including those of viruses and diseases) that the earth receives from space from time to time. Source: Frontline science magazine