Holy Science

Some Atheists swear by Science and consider it to be capable to answer all problems in the universe. But thus far, we cannot understand the reason of our existence on this planet. In regard to the origin of the universe, Science isn't able to deny the existence of any God or supernatural being. This may seem dumb because it is ridiculously easy to say, but over the years, I've started to agree more and more with this idea.

Yes, inconsistencies exist in holy texts, for example the age of the earth in the Bible. But in no way is this enough to advance that the entire content of those texts is to be thrown away. Not even talking about the fact that these stories went through millions of minds before reaching us, how can we attempt to debunk a story made thousands of years before us... with another story? I firmly believe that Science and Faith are two sides of the same coin, two stories, as fake as the other, trying to explain the world. One, using what we believe to be empirical data based on observations, the other, text written and rewritten by dead people.

I will say we all fundamentally mistake what Science truly is. There is no such thing as "scientific proof". Those are proven wrong time and time again and will continue to be so the more we keep searching for the imaginary "truth". Science is based on observations of our world, which we call "empiric data". While the observation itself is real, the meaning we attribute to it is completely arbitrary. What is an atom? What is gravity? Stories, which we pass along and believe in. Rightly so! As they are damn useful for living our lives free of unnecessary danger, especially gravity. But gravity doesn't exist outside of our beliefs. We think it does, because stuff around us behaves exactly as if it existed, but there is no entity called "gravity" out there. It's just a name assigned to a phenomenon. We believe that X circumstance will bring about Y reaction, and we believe that it will be the same story tomorrow. We look at data spewed out of an electronic microscope and say "aah yes, Caesium-133." Do we actually know anything? Hell no. Any conclusion we draw from anything is based on beliefs, not reality. There really is something, but that's all we can say. A better sentence would be "There is." An even better one? "Is." Going any closer to what something really is is an impossible task as verbalised understanding is only able to describe, nothing else. Results from experiments do not give us insight on how the world works, only on the reliability of our man-made models.

Debunking religions is one of Science's last worries. It is simply a representation of reality, constructed through theories and experiments that ultimately boil down to throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Science cannot answer existential questions because we have no way of truly understanding reality, no matter how hard we try. We can tell a story, itself based on millions of smaller stories, of how the world behaves. That's all. Discovering and naming new subatomic particles will not bring us any closer to "ze truth". Science constantly gets things wrong, but when it does (when it doesn't stick), we change our theories and if they hold up for long enough, it starts to look like we were right all along. Yes, what's written in the books and what we can observe is often similar, but theory and reality really are not the same thing. Hence why I find people using Science to "explain" the world to be rather closed-minded. (More often than not, it's the people the least acquainted with a story who believe the strongest in it. Like those in a certain Europe in the 11th century...)

We are the most advanced dreaming machines that inhabit this planet. Everything we do from the start to the end of our life is creating narratives which we mistake for the truth. From the most mundane ideas to the most vocalised social debates, everything is at its core a story, to which people believe in or not.