Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Newton's Sleep
past errors, as the Roman Catholic Church did in its 1992
acknowledgement that Galileo was right after all, that the Earth
does revolve around the Sun: three centuries late, but courageous
and most welcome none the less. Modern Roman Catholicism has
no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so
years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological
molecules, or with humans evolving from ape-like ancestors -
although it has special opinions on 'ensoulment'. Most mainstream
Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy position.
In theological discussion with religious leaders, I often ask what
their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were
disproved by science. When I put this question to the current,
Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative
or fundamentalist religious leaders do: in such a case, he said,
Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.
Even, I asked, if it's a really central tenet, like (I searched for an
example) reincarnation?
Even then, he answered.
However, he added with a twinkle, it's going to be hard to
disprove reincarnation.
Plainly, the Dalai Lama is right. Religious doctrine that is
insulated from disproof has little reason to worry about the
advance of science. The grand idea, common to many faiths, of a
Creator of the Universe is one such doctrine - difficult alike to
demonstrate or to dismiss.
Moses Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, held that
God could be truly known only if there were free and open study
of both physics and theology [I, 55]. What would happen if science
demonstrated an infinitely old Universe? Then theology would
have to be seriously revamped [II, 25]. Indeed, this is the one
conceivable finding of science that could disprove a Creator -
because an infinitely old universe would never have been created.
It would have always been here.
There are other doctrines, interests and concerns that also
worry about what science will find out. Perhaps, they suggest, it's
better not to know. If men and women turn out to have different
hereditary propensities, won't this be used as an excuse for the
former to suppress the latter? If there's a genetic component of
265