an xcerpt from www.spectator.co.uk
Published in the San Jose Mercury News, 12/10/00
Matthew Parris writes in the Spectator about the quest for certain answers, past & present:
Science is not the new religion. Religion was the old science. The new science, which must manage without God, has found "nature." We must not (it whispers) disturb "nature's balance."
Well, count me among the new athiests. I don't believe in nature. I have seen a tree, but I have never seen nature. I don't believe in nature's way or nature's balance. The history of the planet offers no more reason to believe in a natural balance than the history of mankind offers reason to believe in a beneficent God.
....After the second world war it became common to remark that "science" increasingly dominant, was worryingly amoral: able to tell us the what but unable to tell us the why; unwilling to argue through the moral consequences of its discoveries.
I wish that were true. For instead I believe that science, losing any focused belief in a God who had at least the merit of amounting to a testable claim, has found a new faith: a great, cloudy thing called "nature," too nebulous even to prod, too sloppy properly to test. Science & its priesthood are herding us towards their pillar of cloud with no less than an inclination than Moses had to tell us how to live virtuously.