this prayer to cope with the demons of despair and lack of hope. I am searching in an internal landscape that has been fashioned not by the bright lights of a redeeming god but by the sometimes cold philosophy of science and knowledge. This philosophy offers too little succour to those in pain, to be ever as effective as traditional religion. Science must be able to posit a heaven to gain broad popularity. This heaven must however be earthbound rather than high in the cosmos. It must hold forth a paradigm of progress. The ritual of war and terror must be seen to be a declining influence on human destiny. The eradication of poverty and constraints on individual and political freedom must somehow be achieved by following the rational godless path. The creation of happiness and beauty in our world must be a requisite fallout of the continuing development of technical and engineering science. By positing a goal or heaven that is attainable for all of humanity here on earth, the rationalist cause can be seen to offer a greater and real heaven in our current life.
The separation of science and politics has long been the norm in society. It was only after the second world war that the influence that science could have on the political world became apparent. The presence of nuclear weapons shaped the geo-political landscape of the second half of the twentieth century. The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a clear warning to warring factions that use of such weapons spelt the endgame for mankind. It didn't stop the proliferation of conventional conflict but it did prevent the major world powers from ever meeting in a head-on conflict, preferring to act out their wars on the margins. All the time the threat of all-out nuclear war was a fear that overshadowed the political world. The fear has all but disappeared with the warming of the cold war and the softening of the clash of political ideologies. Yet it remains in the political background, as a smoking fuse threatening to explode unexpectedly. The economic costs of conventional war are enormous - the Iraq war has cost untold trillions of dollars. It has not passed the notice of economists that a single nuclear warhead costing the minutest fraction of the current ongoing cost of that war would be infinitely more effective. This chilling notion of the economics of war will eventually come to pass.
Already the economic forces are driving a new commitment to nuclear electricity generation that the latter half of the twentieth century had turned away from. The downstream risk of increased nuclear power facilities is at least the equivalent of the impact of releasing a nuclear warhead on an enemy. Political economics may drive the nuclear debate not just in its social usage but in its conflict resolution usage.
With the nuclear debate, science has influenced the political world for both the good and the bad. What is needed is to remove the threat of nuclear war. Science has to offer a vision of the future where the hell of nuclear Armageddon is replaced by a nuclear risk-free utopia, where there is free and abundant energy available to feed the requirements of the ever expanding populations of the world. The threat of nuclear war can only be countered as we have already seen by the counterbalancing of threat. This means that the technology will have to be made available in a controlled manner to all who want it as a protection to perceived threat.
This is already the paradigm of science anyway. Science and its discoveries is truly open and international. It cuts across creed and political ideology. Modern quantum theory development is an international affair. It had its early development in Germany, Britain, Russia and France. The Americans then took up the baton in the post war era. The Japanese made major contributions after the second world war. Other major contributions have come India and China. Today most countries in the world are making their own contribution to particular aspects of the giant enterprise that is the search for a unified theory of relativity and the quantum world. The technical development fallout of this enterprise is also totally international. This model of open and concerted effort on the part of disparate nations and ideologies is the hope that science brings to the world. It is leading by example in the way that the future world must organise its affairs. It substitutes a common goal on all peoples from which all people will gain equally.
If the resources that are made available to the current world powers in fighting their marginal conflicts over economic issues, were made available to the scientific effort, then incredible progress could be attained. The development of nuclear fusion could provide a cheap environmentally neutral source of power for all. The development of biotechnology could see the elimination and eradication of many diseases. Genetically modified foods may enable us to feed the increasing world populations. But it is not just in the materialistic world that progress can be made and held up as a beacon of hope. The openness of the scientific paradigm, where there is freedom to hypothesise and more importantly criticise, will lead to a similar openness in other areas; philosophy, arts, culture, politics and even religious belief, for those who still have need of it. The earthly revelations of science and knowledge together with the hope for the future that they engender, may well in time displace the need for an irrational heaven in a post-death future.
I tried to envision this sense of rationalist hope. A bright light appeared before my eyes. I opened them and saw before me one of the most wondrous sights in our world. There in the east, despite Hume's worst fears, was the beautiful orb of the risen sun. The light flowed from it in gentle waves, covering all of my spacetime world in an glowing brightness, a signal from the very recent past that all was well with the solar system, the galaxy and the entire cosmos. The laws were working as they should and there was harmony amongst the celestial lights. The darkness had evaporated and the pale blue colour of our life giving biosphere had returned.
A thrill of pure elation coursed through my mind. My body relaxed into the harmony of the natural vibrations of existence. I was at one with my environment, with the world, with the cosmos. I had a glimpse of the eternity of heaven, that has been the dream of the mystic and the ascetic. The pure calm that befell me was not possible to put into words. It was like a divine revelation that the world was one. I was part of an undivided whole and that being part of it meant that I would always exist - not in this bodily or mental form but in my dispersed substance. All the atoms of my being would continue on their journey through spacetime as they must. The laws of nature, be they classical or quantum, must apply from the past to the future. The trillions of particles that have chanced to come together to form me, have been in the cosmos from the start of time, if there be such a thing as the Big Bang. They were fated to come together at that moment of my conception, to form the nucleus or seed of condensation upon which the environment could deliver up all its primordial brothers. For the briefest of intervals I will have graced this tiny island of the cosmos with my existence until, once more, I spread again out into the cosmos. Death is the release of my essence, my being, back into the wholeness of the manifold of spacetime. The only relic of my being will be the entangled state of the atoms of my remains, bearing the sign of my existence for all eternity.
Thoughts of death were not morose, even in the context of the splendour of the rising sun. The unity of life and death, made death just a transition in the summation of my existence. Life was something that had emerged from spacetime and was always destined to return. The over-riding thrust of the second law of thermodynamics, entropy increase, meant that the temporal entropy decrease, that allows life to exist, must follow the greater flow. We are like little vortices in a raging stream. The vortex allows water to run counter to the general flow direction, but is ultimately carried along by the current and dissipates. Vortices come and go - just as in life there is birth and death, all part of the flow of the cosmos.
I felt the gentle pull of the cosmos - the breeze that massaged my face, the almost imperceptible pull of the tides, the equally imperceptible rise of the sun, the slow change of the seasons, the gradual aging of my body. I was returning to the great movement of the unity of existence. My brief solipsistic existence was only a dream, a dream full of wondrous possibilities and sensations, yet equally full
of horrible and terrifying potentialities. Dreams are often nightmares with no escape. I was not deluded into thinking of the cosmos as only throwing up what we call good, but knew it was equally likely to toss up what we all more readily agree on as bad. This was a mystery that had few solutions. The laws of science were not moral at the local level. They were blind to suffering. They could happily throw up a tsunami or an earthquake in our little locale of spacetime. The collateral damage, the intense horror of pain and suffering, is not of concern to the greater cosmos. The even greater mystery of the terror inflicted by humans upon each other, goes equally unnoticed. Nature as it exposes itself to us here on earth, does not stop to question its behaviour. It is completely inhuman in its actions. The laws ordain the course of events and all are swept along in the current. The storm fells the tree that falls on the house and smashes the baby's body. All emotion is absent. Their is not intent. It just is. The facts are pure chance. Nature is not guilty. It has no freedom. It must