How many roads..?

There are a few things I've seen on TV recently which worry me slightly. The Exorcism programme on Channel 4 was one, and there was a documentary a week or so ago about limiting freedom of speech to disclude anything which went against someone's religion.

In the Exorcism, a minister of some form performed an 'exorcism' on one of his parishoners under 'scientific' conditions. The guy being exorcised was a re-born Christian, convinced that he was possessed by demons because sometimes he didn't want to do 'God's will'. He'd volunteered for the procedure. Basically, they plugged him in to an EEG (brain-monitor) to watch how his brain changed during and after the procedure. The programme lasted about an hour, while the excorcism itself lasted a little less than five minutes. Most of the rest of it was adverts, interviews with people representing many different religions, interviews with 'scientific experts' (who, apart from the two guys performing the experiment, were *all* Christian to one extent or another), and the introduction to the experiment ("This produces a squiggly line...") and some conclusions.

The other documentary I think I've mentioned on this journal before. It focussed on the incident with the Sikh play 'Dishonour' whereby loads of Sikhs mobbed the theatre in protest until the play was cancelled, and then there was the Jerry Springer: The Opera controversy. Their point was that religious groups are starting to claim that the limit to freedom of speech occurs when their beliefs are challenged.

Both of the two were worrying to me. The freedom of speech issue is a obvious one. I'm a scientist by training, and it's part of my nature to question things. When people start saying 'Oh, but you can't question that', I start getting worried. If it can't stand up to questions, then how solid is it, really? Plus, with the whole Jerry Springer: The Opera thing, I keep wondering what right anyone has to say that I cannot be exposed to anything that is against their religion? How many religions are there in Britain? Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Church of England, Church of Scotland, various forms of paganism... there's loads of them, and that's just off the top of my head! If we start to censor everything that goes against any of them, we'll end up with entirely beige TV. Not to mention theatre, books, poems, paintings, scuptures and other ways people have of expressing their ideas and doubts.

Now, I don't like discrimination any more than the next person. I try my utmost not to insult someone's religion. However, that doesn't mean I want to live their religion. I certainly don't want to be forced to observe all of them in my ideas and what I'm exposed to. So, I'm with lordofthemoon when he says that if you think it'll insult you or you don't want to watch, find the off switch. It's as simple as that. If I can accept that your truth is that God made the world and sent down his Son to save us all from Sin and that only by accepting that can we find eternal life, why is it so hard for you to accept that that is not my truth?

The Exorcism is perhaps less obvious. I don't believe that the guy was actually possessed by demons: it seems more likely to me that he simply personified his own weaknesses and perceived failings and needed a way to purge them so that he could move past them. The difference is basically a linguistic one, though. And that wasn't what worried me. What did worry me was that, in this programme that tried to find the science under the religion, much less than half of the programme was devoted to science. The rest focussed on the religion. There was only one person interviewed who suggested that the exorcism mught not be literally true. It was as if all the people who didn't believe had either been deliberately screened out of the programme or were too afraid to contradict their religious colleagues to say anything even remotely controversial. That smacks of limited freedom of speech, to me. The religious may down-say science if they wish, but any religious matter is, well, sacrosanct, and even those who do not believe may not gainsay it. I'm not saying there's a law in place, but the attitude on the television appears to be growing.

The other problem I had was with the science. The guy running the experiment was asked to explain it. He was reduced to using "squiggly line" to describe the output of the EEG. I mean, do I know too much about science, or is the science you see on TV actually getting more and more patronising?

This was another symptom of something I've been seeing before now. Kids at Holyrood have to take English right up to their fifth year at the school. They may, if they wish, drop maths after Standard Grades, though. This is a new development: when I was at school, English and Maths were given equal weighting. Why did they let them drop Maths? Almost certainly because it's hard.

Yes, English is fundamental to practically any career you may choose. But if you don't have maths, then you barr yourself from a variety of careers. All scientific ones, for a start. But it also teaches you logical thought, problem solving, detatching yourself from irrelevant details to focus on a problem, and the basic skills you will need if you're going to understand statistics. Statistics bombard us from all sides, but they're hardly even touched on at school. So who understands them? Only the science graduates? Maths is valuable, but it's the kind of thing you can't apreciate unless you've done it. Who's to say that someone who drops maths at sixteen won't regret it at twenty when they decide that they want to learn engineering? Or computer programming, or even some of the many careers that require good numeracy if not excellent maths skills?

Slowly, it appears to me that science is becoming distanced from the public. Journalists are practically exclusively arts graduates, who seem to fear the complications that science can bring. Issues such as genetically modified crops, global warming and stem-cell research are reported on by people who don't understand what they're saying, and the panic-response and "slippery-slope" arguments of the protesters are given as much weight as the science, if not more since the journalists can understand that bit. There are many programmes and documentaries about science, but if you look closer you'll see that most of the time they're not about science: they're about building drama, or resourceful charismatic people, or the history of science.

Science is asking questions and answering them. It requires knowledge of maths (to derive theories), experimental methods (to perform fair and unbiased experiments and draw valid conclusions from the results), and statistics (to work with errors in experiments and distributions of results). The number of planets in the solar system is not science. The statement that man evolved from apes is not science. These are simply answers that have been derived from science. The real science is "Hmm, we can see five of these planets with the naked eye, but are there others that we can't see?", and "I wonder why humans are so much more like apes than, say, lions, or fish, or flies...", and the process that allowed answers to those questions to be discovered.

As I see it, there are three possible routes to 'truth' in today's world: the objective, the subjective and the dogmatic. The objective is science, where the scientist observes and distills what is observed until he or she discovers what doesn't vary with observer, place, time, and calls that truth. The subjective is art, where paint, sculpture or words are used to let us see something from someone else's perspective, glorying in the human bias. The dogmatic is religion, where holy books or scriptures or laws are followed without question until the reward is achieved.

But I wonder: if God created the universe, and God created humankind, and humankind created the Holy Books then, even if God intervened indirectly, can we not learn more about God by studying the universe (science) or humanity (art) than by studying the holy books? So is the current pro-religion, anti-science trend not counter-intuitive? And if we let people give up on things because they are hard, are we not telling them that anything hard is not worth doing, when, in fact, exactly the opposite is true? After all, what Galileo did wasn't easy, what Marie Curie did wasn't easy, and what Jesus did wasn't easy. What if they'd simply given up, any of them?