Science of Discworld III

‘wrong’.
    Belief systems rely on faith, not evidence. They provide answers – but they don’t provide any rational process to assess those answers. So although there are questions beyond the capacity of science to answer, that’s mostly because science sets itself high standards for evidence, and holds its tongue when there isn’t any. The alleged superiority of belief systems compared to science, when it comes to these deep mysteries, stems not from a failure of science, but from the willingness of belief systems to accept authority without question.
    So the religious person can take comfort that his or her beliefs provide answers to deep questions of human existence that are beyond the powers of science, and the atheist can take comfort that there is absolutely no reason to expect those answers to be right. But also no way to prove them wrong, so why don’t we just coexist peacefully, stay off each other’s turf, and each get on with our own thing? Which is easy to say but harder to do, especially when some people refuse to stick to their own turf, and use political means, or violence, to promote their views, when rational debate long ago demolished them.
    Some aspects of some belief systems are testable, of course – the Grand Canyon is not evidence for Noah’s flood, unless God is having a quiet joke at our expense, which admittedly would be a very Discworld thing to do. And if He is, then all bets are off, because His revealed word in [insert your preferred Holy Book] may well be a joke too. Other aspects are not testable: the deeper issues stray into intellectual territory where, in the end, you have to settle for whatever explanation your type of mind finds convincing, or just stop asking that kind of question.
    But remember: what’s most interesting about your beliefs, to anyone who does not share them, is not whether you’re right – it’s that what you believe is a window into the workings of your mind. ‘Ah, so you think like that , do you?’
    This is where the great mystery of human existence leads, and where all explanations are true – for a given value of ‘true’.
    1 That is to say, the Richard Dawkins of our leg of the famous Trousers of Time, who is, in a very definite way, not in holy orders.
    2 For detailed and thoughtful rebuttals of the main contentions of the intelligent designers, plus some responses, see Matt Young and Taner Edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004), and William Dembski and Michael Ruse, Debating Design (Cambridge University Press, 2004). And it’s only a matter of time before someone writes How Intelligent Is the Designer?
    3 Only the camera obscura, a room with a pinhole in the wall. Paley first wrote about the eye in 1802, whereas genuine photography dates from 1826.
    4 ‘A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, volume 256 (1994), pp. 53–8.
    5 They themselves refer to this programme as the ‘wedge strategy’.

FIVE
THE WRONG TROUSERS OF TIME
    T HE GLASS GLOBE OF R OUNDWORLD had been installed on a pedestal in front of Hex by the time most of the senior faculty were up and milling around. They were always at a bit of a loose end when Second Breakfast had finished and it wasn’t yet time for Elevenses, and this looked like entertainment.
    ‘One asks oneself whether it really is worth saving,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘It’s had huge ice ages before, hasn’t it? If the humans are too stupid to leave in time, then there’s bound to be another interesting species around in half a million years or so.’
    ‘But extinction is so … sort of … final ,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    ‘Yes, and we created their world and helped them become intelligent,’ said the Dean. ‘We can’t just let them freeze to death. It’d be like going on holiday and not feeding the hamster.’
    A watchmaker as part of the watch, thought Ponder, adjusting the university’s biggest omniscope; not just making the world, but tweaking it all the time …
    Wizards did not believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of thenarrativium that made things work, that gave the world its purpose. It was just that they were best avoided close up.
    Roundworld had no gods that the wizards had been able to find. But one that