The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,134

or blowing women and children to smithereens in order to get yourself into Heaven – typical tactics of Roundworld’s own over-zealous zealots. With a few exceptions of that kind, largely to do with who counts as a genuine person, most of the world’s religions have their prized moral values in common. However, they are little more than the standard default values of most human societies. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t like done to you. Nearly all of us can sign up to these values, be we Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Jedi Knights … even agnostics and atheists. It is not necessary to invoke a god to provide ‘authority’ for them. They are the common currency of humanity.

That leaves the supernatural elements for us to disagree about, and that’s where the real trouble starts. Those elements matter, because they endow a religion with its cultural significance. Anyone can sign up to ‘don’t kill people’, but only we Righteously Reformed Rincewindian Roundworldists genuinely believe that the entire universe is a foot across and sits on a shelf in Unseen University.

Prove us wrong.

We’re sitting in the audience, and there’s a debate in progress on the stage. The protagonist is very sure of his position, has good clear pictures, and is very clear about his story. His antagonist is different. She is rather unsure; her pictures are sketches and cartoons, and she is altogether more tentative.

Which do we tend to believe?

It mostly depends on who we are.

There are some who like certainty; they like to know just where they are. They tend to get their knowledge, their beliefs, from authoritative sources: the Bible, the Quran, textbooks, or the practices of their professions. They know that those who disagree with them are at least wrong, and sometimes evil. It’s certainly more than sinful for politicians to change their position on almost any topic. They simply can’t understand why someone can’t see the Truth when it’s presented to them, or that someone can’t appreciate the clarity of their assertions or the power of their arguments.

Over the years we have found, somewhat to our surprise, that many scientists are also like this. In private, they often acknowledge that there are difficulties with the current state-of-the-art theories in their subject area. They may even accept that some key features might have to be changed as more evidence comes in. But their public face is one of complete certainty. There are biologists who know that the most important feature of any organism is its DNA, and that virtually everything about living creatures is explained by their genes. There are physicists who know that the universe is made up of these particles, with these constants and mechanisms. They know that, ultimately, everything in the world reduces to fundamental physics. We can see that engineers can very easily adopt this position about their subject; after all, it is almost entirely man-made: gears, engines, oscilloscopes, MRI machines, LEDs, cyclotrons … But electrons? Quantum waves? W and Z particles? The Higgs boson?

Others are suspicious of such certainty, tending to say ‘I don’t know’ quite a lot, and are unsure about lots of things. Their beliefs have come from a medley of sources, many of them quite unreliable; they tend to change their minds, even about quite important issues.

Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon initially takes us back to the times when people didn’t have access to information of any reliable kind. But like so many New-Agers today, they took ‘information’ from astrology, from myths, from gossip, from folklore – because there wasn’t anywhere else to get it. Extelligence, the information outside heads, was then very disorganised; but primitive religions were an exception. They were often extensively organised, with lots of gods and goddesses, a cosmology or three, ceremonies and rituals.

Religions, in fact, were the most organised ways to run your life. As time passed, some kind of natural selection among religions went on, so that the ones that survived, the ones that gained adherents, became more effective for gaining even more. The Ten Commandments was a very good set, ensuring that there were less social problems even if most were ‘More honor’d in the breach than the observance’. ‘Eat rotting meat’ would have been a bad one. ‘Love your neighbour’ was remarkably good (initially in Judaism, then in Christianity), then spreading through the next 1500 years, according to a suggestion in Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature about the universal decline of human