I recently received an email regarding the film The Golden Compass. The mail alleged that the film starring Nicole Kidman and based on a series of books by author Peter Pullman is anti-Christianity. (Excerpts of the mail can be found here.)

Whatever Pullman’s stand is, I’ll leave it to one’s own conviction whether to catch the film or not. Either way, I have never been quite comfortable with linking Hollywood and religion, be it against or in support – as in the case of ‘The Passion’ and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.

Such actions border on fanaticism and it brings conflict between believers and non-believers which only further deepens any existing misunderstanding. In fact, such conflicts are really unhelpful and have already brought many to ask, ‘Is God (or religion) still relevant in the present day where science is attempting to answer every phenomenon in the physical world?’

Indeed, it would appear that the world has more conflicts as a result of religion. Some of the enmity today is a result of wars more than a thousand years ago between two major monotheistic religions – Christianity and Islam.

Thus, we believe that God is outdated and irrelevant. Faith in a God is the superstition of the under-informed and the ignorant. Friedrich Nietzsche goes so far to say ‘God is dead!’. And the post-modern man goes even further to claim, ‘God is but a construct of our intellect. There was never a God.’

Yet, mankind today placed as much faith (if not more) on many other things as we used to place in religion or God in the past. For e.g. we believed that the physics behind the elevator has been worked out properly by engineers and it will take us safely to the level we are going to. We step onto a bridge, and believed the civil engineers have worked out the math to ensure it will support all that weight on it. We go to work on the 60th floor of a sky-scrapper, without fear of its collapse because we believed the architects have worked out the sums correctly and pillars of the right size are supporting the building. It doesn’t matter we don’t actually go find out on ourselves if all of these things we believe in are really done as they should be. We believed what our science textbooks tell us – for e.g. E=mc^2, F=MA, V=IR, 1+1=2 etc. – just like our forebears would have believe in the commandments of God or the tenets of their religion.

Has science and its offspring technology become a substitution for God? Have they make our world better since it is science which allowed us to understand many things?

Technology has definitely provided us much creature comforts. We have automobiles that takes us to our destination quickly and conveniently, planes which whisk us across half the planet in a day, and air conditioners that makes our dwellings comfortable. We already possessed the power to make changes to large tracts of our landscape. But at what cost? At the cost of exploiting our planet’s resources in which we replaced with tonnes of waste a year in the form of trash and carbon dioxide. The cost of maybe the death of million other species, and our planet with it.

Also, because of limited resources, science would have taught us to use our resources in the most cost effective ways possible. Taken to the extreme, that would mean we should euthanise people who are brain dead; and abandon the old and less productive and also those who has disabilities (or even kill them before birth).

But since pagan Rome has Christians been taking in people who are sick and desolate and to give care to them. Is science really more superior than the belief in God?

It is almost funny that many people who doesn’t believe in a God also believe that if we have some ‘oughts’ we need to enforce, we should just make a law to do so – for e.g. banning chewing gum entirely because we ought to keep the MRT free from gum that get the doors stuck. We ought to maintain our parents and not abandon them so we make laws to punish such people and set up family courts where parents can sue their unfilial children. We ought to allow everyone to freely express themselves and to do what they want, so any strong objections against that should be labeled a ‘hate crime’ and be outlawed. We ought to separate the matter of religion and politics and not mix the two.

But on what basis do we apply our laws? Morality? If the basis is morality, then wouldn’t one’s morality simply just be one’s own bigotry or self-righteous views then? Why is there still a need for ‘oughts’ (i.e. socially acceptable norms) if that’s the case? Take for example, if you felt that I should give up my seat to a pregnant lady, who are you to enforce it upon me since I would have felt it is equally right for me to occupy that seat because I have paid the same fare and I am tired? Yet, anyone who hears of such an argument would visibly wince or even protest loudly about the person’s selfishness.

Some would even call morality the attempt to use God to enforce one’s own bigotry. But think further, why are there things that we will all universally feel indignant about? Why are there things that we instinctively would feel is wrong? For e.g. why would a child lie and try to push the blame away when confronted for the missing candy in the candy jar for the first time, even when no one has told him that it is wrong? Why is there this concept of ‘conscience’?

We must also ask, where did some of our more humane ideals such as equality come from? Granted there are bastards that wouldn’t practice what they preach, is it not true that Christianity teaches that we should love all as we loved ourselves? Is it also not true that some of the greatest fighters for equality and freedom are driven by their faith in God? Without God, would the world not have degenerated into a dog-eat-dog world, where the strongest would dictate the terms and the weak would just be exploited? Yet, it will take no one much convincing that it is only right to protect the weak.

Is there really no God, or like me, I just see God everywhere? And no, I am not pitching for anyone to start having some kind of religious beliefs, but this has been eating at me for awhile and I just felt a need to say it.