It’s videos like this, ‘How science can be as comforting as religion,’ made by The School of Life, that help me realize I have far yet to go in getting along with people and loving the unlovable, including the arrogantly naïve, however calming their voices may be. Although being a newbie to Catholicism, I already see how a lack of faith renders one’s depiction of reality sterile.
As if comfort is the point
What comfort is it, as the video claims, that the universe is so much bigger than our individual organism? If the universe was the size of, say, a tiny apartment, are we entitled to start worrying? Will things only then be of consequence?
And why should feeling like we’re “nothing” be a consolation anyway? How troubling is it when science is considered comforting because of the alleged meaninglessness of it all? No wonder depression is such a pervasive issue nowadays, when being “something” is a perceived threat. I would reason out that we ought not to be anxious because of our significance to the Creator Himself who loves us.
The makers of the video take Ecclesiastes’ “All is vanity” — which is about the futility of a life aimed at satisfying strictly natural needs — out of context, so as to ‘improve’ it with, and this is lame… the second law of thermodynamics, or the tendency of all matter and energy to entropy. With the Bible verse interpreted so myopically, it’s no surprise that the physical parallel is, methodologically speaking, irrelevant to human action, which is about defying a state of rest.
Infidels
Contrary to what the video tells us, religion’s purpose is not to make life bearable. Only a nonbeliever, or rather, a believer in the necessarily detached, flat world that is science would characterize religion as such, explaining it away as an evolutionary mechanism no more real than a comforting lie. But religion, specifically Christianity, is about union with God and eternal salvation as accorded us spiritual beings through Jesus.
If science was everything, was all existence had to offer, there’d be no one to experience it. Now that’s one big nothing.* But this is not true; we’re here to confirm life, whatever finiteness we attribute to it in our lack of faith.
Fueled by randomness
Science is about the application of cause and effect to phenomena, where any randomness of events is assumed due to the natural limits of cognition, and not because randomness is proven. Faithless materialists, however, latch on to an assumption of randomness to reality, in order to elicit amazement that thinking creatures came to be at all, for which to be grateful. So much for being comforted by our ‘nothingness.’
All this talk about evolutionary development at a cosmic scale dupes even the video’s authors to thinking they’ve gotten farther than primitive, homogeneous religion at answering the why of those things we value, e.g. gratitude. On the surface, the answers of both materialism and religion are just as unsatisfying. Materialists speak in terms of species survival without pinning down the driving force behind this. And the religion-waving person could only really answer, “God made it so.”
However, it is only with the religious that the inquirer is invited to be with He who made all things as they are. The materialist isn’t even good at science when they invoke science.
Making clear what a mess they make of things
For example, the video’s authors have a baseless faith, i.e. superstition, that evolution will sort out all moral inadequacies of ‘personkind.’ We never really choose to do evil; it’s our impulses that just need adjustment. In this evolutionary Eden, we’ll all be satisfied mentally so as to not intrude on others.
So much for thermodynamic vanity, which we were told just a couple of minutes ago should relieve us of any future to deal with! It’s brilliant, really, how the authors couldn’t help contradict themselves in the very same video.
Evolved-impulses-will-vanquish-uncivilization is yet one more cry for a materialistic utopia, where good and evil (or good and bad since the evil one doesn’t really exist) depend on the economy, which is connected to our psychophysiological stability. The fact that so much evil continues today, when economic output has multiplied far greater than the population, doesn’t help sell this dream.
Parting words
I admit to having once agreed with a good deal of the ideas espoused in the video, particularly the buzzwording of ‘evolution’ as though it made sense of actual day-to-day experience and wasn’t just another cop-out for one’s ignorance such as dark matter.
What changed in me was, simply put, Jesus. Faith in God will always be a priority in your life, however advanced in thought you’d like to think you are.
* Science will never address the question of consciousness because by the very nature of science in its being a fictional view from the outside, consciousness from the inside is denied, or merely explained away by physiological or psychological symptoms.
If such a program is to continue, let’s not get it in our heads that such ‘discipline’ is what we need to attain true happiness, like it was some religion of its own. But that’s exactly what they’ve been claiming.
It will be yet some time before the dearth is eased, as a newer batch responds to the calling. It is my hope that eventually, the number of priests will suffice each barangay in a couple of years’ time. Cherishing the priesthood ever more, more young men, and perhaps a few widowers here and there, will see the beauty of possible martyrdom, in service of the Lord.
Paul's Purpose 