Divine doublethink

I pray when I fly. I don't believe in heaven or hell or life after death (though perhaps I should believe in reincarnation, after all, you only live once). I don't really belive in God and I certainly think there are a lot of wholly ridiculous people associated with the whole Belief thing

but

it was a comfort to me to believe that my grandad, who I loved and who was a superb person, had moved on to a better place when he died. In fact, after years of fairly disappointing fishing trips my uncle and my grandad went on one to remember their recently deceased father. They got 8 BIG fish and brought them home, 4 for each family, for a few dinners. My dad commented that perhaps grandad had "had a word upstairs". It's funny. It's true. It's comforting to think of that.

But I'm a scientist. I always wanted to be a scientist, right from the earliest prospective creative writing pieces I wrote as a kid in primary school. Stories in which the hero was an open-minded scientist. I always wanted to be that. Maybe 10 years ago I suddenly realised, fuck, my ambitions came true! Unconsciously... as naturally as tears or laughter, as Stephen King has put it before. So science and religion... difficult to reconcile?

Not really. Science (well look, there are only two kinds of science: physics and stamp collecting) so physics... the laws of matter and space and the forces around them. Physics are the laws set by God. They are the True commandments. The laws that cannot be disobeyed. The laws of physics are the commandments, the Ten Commandments are "more what you might call...guidelines..."

So when I fly, I pray. That God will guide us with a steady hand in accordance with the laws that He, in His infinite wisdom, has established within this world of wonders. I thank Him for the physics of flight, the air channeled by the flaps rushing over the upper surface of the wing, reducing the pressure there. Thank Him for the need of the air to equalise the pressure and as a side effect, to lift the weight of the plane and allow us to travel safely, in His love.

I'm back to normal a few minutes after take off, and return to fawning when the pilot starts his descent.

I do believe in science. In my opinion, it is a belief because in the end, it will run out of answers if you just keep on asking "Why?" It has the advantage though that at some point, it will lead to the answers that are currently unanswerable. In this way, it's not as intellectually lazy, helpless, and... infantile as religion which seems to give up the quest for answers very early in the investigation, resorting to God's will. The curse of belief in science is that it makes me objective enough to feel guilty about my occasional abandonments of rationality, which I realise are all motivated by self-interest in one way or another.

Now, go and do unto others as you would have done to yourself. Amen.