My brain hurts

I've been on a course this week called "Very Hard Sums for Dragons", well OK its really a course of derivatives pricing theory but it basically consists of hard sums - the piccy at the top of this post is one of the more sedate examples. It's been interesting though and I'm getting to use mathematics I haven't done since my university days when I used to do a lot of sums like that and harder to build models for solving fluid dynamics problems (modelling seawater intrusions into freshwater aquifers if you're interested).

It did get me to thinking though, especially as I've been chatting with a few religious types recently, why people still continue to believe in the crap churches of every stripe pump out when it is clear to anyone who really cares to string a bit of logic together that the evidence for a god who (a) created everything and (b) listens to what you say and (c) intervenes in your life is on a par with the likelihood of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) living in my stables.

Now I'm aware of the current ideas of self-replicating memes, of religion being a "misfiring impulse" of a trait that is or was useful to us in our evolutionary past I'm going to postulate another one.

Science is inherently hard to understand and it gets harder the closer you look. Trust me those sums at the top of this post are an absolute doddle when you start mucking about into quantum theory; when you get to it there are probably only a handful of people on the planet who really fully understand what actually happened in the first femtosecond of the universe and why. When you combine this with seeming contradictions like an electron being both a particle and a wave and never knowing exactly where it is then it's easy for a person with a religious predisposition to dismiss much of science as just as unbelievable as their own "faith" in a invisible, omnipotent God so they might as well stick with what they know.

This is however an error. You can join in the science side if you want, it'll take some effort and to really, really understand it you're going to have to learn a lot about maths, physics and a whole host of other disciplines but you can start small; maybe read that book by Steven Hawkins or something. The thing is that you can participate and see that the logic works and even if you can't devote the twenty odd years it'll take you to get that astrophysics PhD you'll at least be on the way; you'll also have confidence that, because of the scientific method, that what the clever handful are telling you about the origins of the universe will be as correct as it's possible to be because a whole host of people have spent their lives trying to pick holes in what these guys and girls are saying; it's called "peer review". There's simply no way you can do the same with religion, you have to take what you are given on faith alone as religions assertions are impossible to prove using logic and reason. You have to go on faith alone, what someone tells you to believe, you can't participate because when you look at the faith critically and try and apply reason it doesn't work.

It all takes work however and it's probably unsettling to have to do all that questioning and so I think a lot of people, especially if they're not too bright or well educated, prefer to stay in the comfort zone of a religious faith that was handed down to them in childhood. "I'll never understand this science, all those equations scare me; better stick with my invisible friend."

Just an idle thought on the train home this evening. Comments from god-botherers welcome as ever.