The Science of Discworld IV

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 violence.
    Now that extelligence has become better organised, with such things as internet search engines to help us navigate through overwhelming quantities of information, we can look back and see the beginnings of rationality among the Egyptians and the Greeks; then to some extent among the Romans and the Hebrews; then the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Rationality, and the beginnings of science, Bacon and Descartes, began to take over from theology as a way to run life, at least for a few people – those who wrote the tracts, anyway. From steam-power and canals and trains, via the industrial revolution, this led to the modern world.
    However, religions remained as a backdrop to the play. Priests were always there to give their blessings, or to curse advances in rationality. Galileo, persecuted by the Church for his belief that the Earth went round the Sun, stands for thousands of such episodes. The Catholic Church has recently admitted it was in the wrong on that occasion, though rather grudgingly, and with growing ambivalence. But what about all the others, minor and major?
    Among Western people, a solid proportion are now basically rational in their approach to life and its problems, but about 30% run their lives in strict accordance with religious tenets of one kind or another. Nothing like that many regularly attend churches or synagogues, but most Muslims go to mosques. The majority don’t give the way they should live a lot of thought; they run their daily lives as a matter of habit, conditioned by whim … Is that really toopessimistic a statement? How many people get home from work, turn the television on and their minds off?
    Mobile phones and the internet are helping, but the attitude to these is often closer to religion than rational: they are seen as supernatural, worked by demons, perhaps. You know what we mean, if you come from the era before mobile phones: they’re miraculous. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote: ‘Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This was the main theme of
The Science of Discworld
, especially in Benford’s alternative form ‘Technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced’.
    Many Cambodians, especially those in the hill tribes, are animists. They believe that spirits