The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,16

the Amazon rainforest now seems to be the result of agricultural and architectural activity by ancient South American civilisations.

The differences between the two Benfordian worldviews are profound, but remain manageable as long as they don’t overtly clash. Trouble arises when both worldviews are applied to the same things. Then, they may conflict with each other, and intellectual conflict can turn into political conflict. The uneasy relation between science and religion is a case in point. There are comforting ways to resolve the apparent conflict, and there are plenty of religious scientists, although few of them are Biblical literalists. But the default ways of thinking in science and religion are fundamentally different, and even determined social relativists tend to feel uneasy when they try to claim there’s no serious conflict. Benford’s distinction explains why.

Most religious explanations of the world are human-centred. They endow the world with purpose, a human attribute; they place humans at the pinnacle of creation; they consider animals and plants to be resources placed on Earth for the benefit of humanity. In order to explain human intelligence and will, they introduce ideas like the soul or the spirit, even though no corresponding organs can be found in the human body, and from there it is a short step to the afterlife, whose existence is based entirely on faith, not evidence. So it should be no surprise that throughout history, science and religion have clashed. Moderates in both camps have always understood that these clashes are in a sense unnecessary. Looking back after enough time has passed, it is often hard to understand what all the fuss was about. But at the time, those two distinct worldviews simply could not accommodate each other.

The biggest battleground, in this context, is life. The astonishing world of living organisms: Life with a capital L. And, even more so, human consciousness. We are surrounded by life, we ourselves are conscious living beings … and we find it all terribly mysterious. Thirty thousand years ago some humans could carve quite realistic animals and people from bone or ivory, but no one, even today, knows how to breathe life into an inanimate object. Indeed, the idea that life is something you can ‘breathe into’ an inanimate object is not particularly sensible. Living creatures are not made by starting with a dead version and bringing it to life. Universe-centred thinkers understand this, but human-centred thinkers often see the body – especially the human body – as a dead thing that is animated by a separate, and immaterial, soul or spirit.

The proof of course is that we observe the reverse process on a regular basis. When someone dies, life seems to pass from their body, leaving a corpse. Where did the life go?

Agreed, science doesn’t fully understand what gives us our personalities and consciousness, but it is pretty clear that personality derives from the structure and operation of a brain inside a body, interacting with the external world, especially other human beings. The person develops as the human develops. It’s not a supernatural thing, inserted at conception or birth, with a separate existence of its own. It’s a process carried out by ordinary matter in a living person, and when that person dies, their process stops. It doesn’t depart into a new existence outside the ordinary universe.

In a human-centred view, souls make sense. In a universe-centred one, they look like a philosophical category error. In centuries of studying human beings, not a shred of convincing scientific evidence has ever been found for a soul. The same goes for all of the supernatural elements of all of the world’s religions. Science and religion can coexist peacefully, and it’s probably best that they do. But until religions discard the supernatural, these two very different worldviews can never be fully reconciled. And when fundamentalists try to discredit science because it conflicts with their beliefs, they bring their beliefs into disrepute and provoke unnecessary conflict.

However, even though human-centred thinking can be abused, we cannot understand our place in the universe by using only universe-centred thinking. It’s a human-centred question, and our relationship to the universe involves both points of view. Even though everything in the universe is made from seventeen fundamental particles, it’s how those particles are combined, and how the resulting systems behave, that make us what we are.

fn1 Ever since the 1970s physicists have speculated that quarks and electrons are actually made from even smaller particles, variously named alphons, haplons, helons, maons, prequarks, primons, quinks, rishons, subquarks, tweedles and