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Knol

thing. Either the thing must change due to an internal process, or it must be accessed by an external mechanism through the entry to the safe or vault. This ability to keep some entity immutable, and perhaps secret, offers a seminal source of trust when used in certain protocols.

Science is the Religion of Disbelief

In Religion Explained, Pascal Boyer notes, “Persons can be represented as having counterintuitive physical properties (e.g., ghosts or gods), counterintuitive biology (gods who neither grow nor die) or counterintuitive psychological properties (unblocked perception or prescience). Animals too can have all these properties. Tools and other artifacts can be represented as having biological properties (some statues bleed) or psychological ones (they hear what you say).”

He also notices that a god, as an eternal person who never dies, is nevertheless in other respects a carrier of the normal properties of a person (listening, caring, demanding, etc). In technical terms, that god presents most of the properties of a person but supplants at least one of them; specifically, the god doesn’t die. This, we would represent as follows (we simplify and take liberty with the formalism here, but this doesn’t affect the message we intend to convey):

together with:

So, in a formal sense, what we’ve done is taken an ordinary person and made that person into a god by just changing one property from the value usually associated with a person. We’ve turned that property into one that we would associate with a god. To fully implement the transformation, faith is required in granting a status of existence to the new entity. Faith, as we have suggested previously, is a level of the continuum that is trust. Carrying on then, this new entity can now be involved in interactions with others, either people born out of hard sensory experience, or perhaps also created through the same mechanism as our god. If the result of those interactions brings accepted results then the initial faith is validated and repetitive observation of those results reinforces the faith involved. Conversely, rejected results either diminish that faith or are cause to seek further explanations. While we are aware that such an interpretation has been rejected outright by such respected authors as Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, we observe that this rejection was essentially reduced to a sleight of hand in a footnote (our translation): “We will not stop and discuss such an unsustainable conception, which in fact, has never been sustained in a systematic fashion by minds somewhat acquainted with the history of religions.” We prefer to be called “ignorant of the history of religions” rather than relinquish a natural explanation of the personal and social interactions involved.

While we’ve suggested how a god can be formally created from an otherwise unaltered entity, the initial reaction of the scientist to a perturbation in accumulated experience would be symmetrically opposed to the one we have just illustrated. This reaction is part of the practice of science, but is in no way restricted to scientists. However, for convenience, we will consider for the moment the behavior of the scientist. Confronted with an unexpected event, the scientist will deny any extra, changed property to the object observed. Rather, she will attempt first to fit the experience within

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