God and Science: Selective Ignorance.

Recently, I found myself reflecting on a jarring paradox that characterizes practically every single one of us: the extraordinary ease with which we are willing to believe in the divine and the stubborn distrust we show, instead, toward science. In a modern world like this, it should be exactly the opposite; instead, we are still here blindly believing in fairy tales and doubting facts.

I know it is a topic that has already been talked about, but I decided to speak on it anyway, both because it annoys me tremendously and because I want a testimony of my thoughts to remain imprinted on the web forever. My point of view is very simple: I just cannot conceive how one can accept the divine and reject science. I hate the dualism between God and science.

However, I told myself, even if I don't understand this attitude, I want to try to comprehend it. It took me a while to reach a conclusion, but perhaps I succeeded: we hate science not because it is useless but because it forces us to continuously put everything into question. And that is fucking scary. In short, we adore staying still and not growing, almost as if we were using ignorance as a shield to protect ourselves from the unknown of progress.

Think about it: life is comfortable when it is predictable, because it makes us feel in control. The moment we know how to move and what to expect, everything runs smoothly. Even when problems arise—as happens to anyone—we know the starting situation, we sense the potential consequences, and we are ready to fight because we have the necessary means to react. When, on the other hand, we are at the mercy of events due to something we cannot control, we do everything we can just to get back into our comfort zone as soon as possible.

The exact same reasoning applies to the relationship between science and faith.

Religion is that simple and unchangeable element that grants security. You know who God is, you know how He behaves, and you know the Bible. No one will EVER start changing dogmas or holy scriptures from one day to the next. Faith gives stability, and in times of strong uncertainty, stability is fundamental.

Science, on the contrary, is the classic sudden earthquake that knocks down your house without you being able to do anything to prevent it. It arrives and changes the rules of the game, improving or even eliminating what was previously taken for granted. And as soon as it puts a certainty into doubt, people immediately try to bar the door to change. They do not want to change. Thus, people often end up bringing religion into play, using it as a brake to block a progress that is actually inevitable. The textbook example is Galileo Galilei: as a fervent believer that he was, he was forced by the Catholic Church to publicly backtrack on the heliocentric theory, the scientific evidence according to which the sun is at the center of the universe and the earth revolves around it.

I will give you three real examples, just to make you laugh!

God and Science: Wuhan and the body of Christ.

What do Sunday mass and one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history have in common? Apparently nothing, yet they share the same deep mechanism: both enter our body. It is the perception of this entry, however, that changes radically.

Between 2020 and 2021, we lived through a global crisis caused by a virus that was isolated, photographed, studied, and finally countered thanks to an unprecedented vaccination campaign. Science delivered the truth of the facts to us in real-time, right before everyone's eyes. Yet, we witnessed a wave of denialism that was almost sci-fi: people doubted the existence of the virus, its actual danger, and the usefulness of lockdowns.

When the cure arrived, many refused to get vaccinated, thinking they were smarter than everyone else. We witnessed the paradox of a crowd that doubts science itself, rejects the words of scientists, and labels public domain reports and analyses as fake. There was a total refusal to let the medical solution that, in fact, saved the world from collapse enter one's own organism.

On the other side of the street, every week, there is mass. We line up orderly to receive the sacred host from the hands of the priest on duty. At that moment, nobody questions the sacredness of that round, whitish little disc.

Nobody doubts the words of the priest regarding the host transforming into the "body of Christ," and everyone blindly accepts ingesting something of which they ignore the actual composition or the production chain. People blindly trust the word of a priest preaching a fantasy story—however convincing it may be. The host is thus swallowed without any hesitation, considered a medicine for the soul.

Meanwhile, the vaccine—designed to save earthly life—is seen as a threat and a vehicle for control. People doubt scientific studies, objective medical evidence, and all documentable and provable truth.

This is the sharp photograph of a population's mental closure: a humanity that does not accept change and the complexity of reality and prefers to cling to an immobile ritual just to not lose its reassuring certainties.

God and Science: The distrust in man and the rejection of greatness.

The phenomenon does not stop at medicine; it extends to every great achievement of our species. Let's think about the moon landing: we have thousands of photos, videos, chemical analyses of moon rocks, and inescapable scientific data at our disposal. Yet, there is still a slice of the population that claims it is all a fake, that in 1969 the necessary technologies were lacking, or that it is "suspicious" that we have not returned with a human crew.

Let's play a game. Let's try to put ourselves in the shoes of those who deny the evidence of the facts, and let's even admit that the doubt deriving from the lack of personal experience is legitimate. At the base of conspiracy thinking lies exactly this: the refusal to believe what one has not seen or experienced firsthand.

If, however, this radical skepticism is so strong that it allows us to ignore objective and overwhelming evidence, then we should be consistent and apply the exact same filter to every aspect of life.

Instead, consistency vanishes. We do not believe three flesh-and-blood men arrived on the Moon—despite the live television broadcasts of the departure, the moon landing, the artifacts, and the photographic data—but we are ready to believe in the creation of the universe by an omnipotent God that no one has ever seen, described in a book written by men for other men. Given an equal "lack of direct verifiability" by the individual, we prefer millennia of invisible tradition over the evidence of an astronaut stepping on lunar dust and bringing the proofs back to Earth.

It is the sign of a deep, chronic distrust toward the human race. We fill our mouths with big words; we celebrate the greatness and potential of the soul, but when these potentials actually materialize right before our eyes, we deny them. We reject them because they exceed our limited perimeter of conception, preferring to take refuge in the potential historical lies written in the Bible and professed by religion.

The truth is that the average man accepts reality under only two conditions: either he must be able to verify it in his own backyard, or it must be so simple that he can chew it without any effort. This is why Genesis wins over Apollo 11. Genesis is right there, printed on paper: you can touch it, you can read it, and it is understandable by anyone. It does not require skills in astrophysics; just knowing how to read is enough. Everything that requires an intellectual effort or goes outside the borders of our reassuring daily life, instead, is immediately labeled as suspicious, manipulated, or programmatically false.

God and Science: Selective ignorance and the vacuum of uncertainty.

There is an even more hypocritical element in this attitude, and it is what we could define as "selective ignorance." In today's society, we scream our rejection toward something just because we cannot understand it or visually control it. But the truth is that it is just a facade.

If we took this skepticism to the extreme, if we were truly consistent with our methodical doubt, our lives would freeze, because everything would be false. We shouldn't take medications whose chemical formula we don't know; we shouldn't believe in motorsports just because we don't see the drivers physically climb into those cockpits up close before the start, nor should we trust the industrial supply chain of the food we eat. Yet, we swallow sleeping pills without asking questions, we watch TV taking for granted that there are human beings inside those single-seaters, and we buy packaged food blindly trusting that it won't poison us.

These are three huge, daily acts of faith which, following the logic of the conspiracy, should cry out scandal. Instead, nobody screams on social media against frozen pizza; on the contrary, it is appreciated as the "evening-saving food." You cannot be a conspiracy theorist—and therefore ignorant—out of convenience: either you are one all the time, or you never are.

And here is the revealed reason why we don't cry out "scandal" with common medicines, with sports, or with groceries: if we truly had to raise doubts about all of this, every single certainty would be put into question. Everything would have to change. And the human being does not want to change, especially when it comes to his most intimate habits, like food and health. Doubting the food supply chain would mean having to give up the convenience of the supermarket; doubting routine medicine would mean having to manage illness without a parachute.

This is where religion wins hands down over our skeptical facade. Religion does not ask us to change our comfortable habits; on the contrary, it protects them by offering ready-made answers that have been unchangeable for centuries. It becomes infinitely easier and more reassuring to delegate everything to the divine, praying to God to heal or to have lunch served on the table, rather than being consistent conspiracy theorists and putting under the magnifying glass the human supply chains that keep us alive every day. Faith is a psychological comfort that requires no effort; science is an intellectual toil that imposes evolution.

Consequently, we choose to question only what does not directly disrupt our daily routine. Denying astrophysics or the moon landing does not change our day, whereas doing it with medicine and everyday grocery shopping would require an enormous effort. And it is even simpler to believe in the creation of the Bible and pray to God to keep us alive.

It is truly all too easy to doubt science only when it is convenient and then take refuge in the immobile embrace of a dogma when reality becomes too difficult to accept.

Small reflections.

At the end of the day, the paradox we live through is not a matter of intelligence but of emotional courage. The human being finds himself at a constant crossroads: on one side, there is the temptation to lock himself inside the reassuring shell of dogma, myth, or convenient conspiracy—immobile worlds where everything is already written, where there is no need to study, and where answers are packaged so as not to make us suffer. On the other side, there is science, with its promise to take us to the Moon or to save us from a virus, at the price, however, of continuously reminding us that we are imperfect creatures forced to evolve and to change.

Denying the great enterprises of humanity and embracing a potential lie is not an act of critical thinking; it is the symptom of the fear of growing up. As long as we prefer the immobile certainty of an illusion to the vertigo of a truth that evolves, we will remain a population of children who prefer to look at the sky waiting for a miracle, rather than roll up our sleeves and admire just how far man, with his own strength alone, has been capable of reaching.

M.