It was an awfully persuasive theory, he had to admit. And even if it was wrong, he was starting to realize that God had to be an alien. There just wa… - Ken Wharton

As remarkably strange as this event was, after a very short while he began to get bored. One of the great human abilities, he thought: tuning out the most fantastic events just because they happen slightly too often.

History, Daddy was saying, has seen thousands of religions, millions of cults, billions of individual belief systems. All of them have been a search for truth, however misguided. Everyone felt the same innate spiritual feelings, but rationalized them in very different ways. And how indeed was prescientific humanity supposed to find the truth? It would have been easier to deduce the inner workings of the sun by staring at it. There was no framework, no alternate source of truth from which they could determine why our spirituality existed.
"But with science came that framework. A framework that blatantly contradicted the false truths that most religions had already locked into their belief system. The literalist religions contended with the heliocentric solar system and biological evolution, both in disagreement with supposed "truths" that had been locked in by people who simply could not have known better. Even mystical religions, with fewer scientific premises to contradict, had their own difficulties. They had to contend with the realization that there was no unphysical soul, no sharp division between mind and body, no action at a distance. Humans had an instinct to seek out the truth, but instinct without a framework only drove them in the wrong direction.
"So what was science's advantage over primitive religions? The advantage of being wrong. To a believer, a religion cannot be wrong, and its evolution is fundamentally limited by this supposed fact. Beliefs that are locked in cannot change, because to change one part requires a questioning of the whole system. But a scientist is always wrong, always in doubt. Constantly framing hypotheses and disproving them, science is always narrowing down the field of what is not true, instead of finding what is true in a single step.
"Science can never be true in the way that a religion can; there are always uncertainties, always the possibility that some new revolution can overthrow the old ways of thinking. And the scientists themselves welcome the revolution! Those who turn their science into a religion, those who instinctively believe in the old theories as absolute truth, they are left behind in the next revolution."

Feelings of desperation clouded his mind. Could this be? Was this the final trap of a “provable” religion based purely on science? Was it inevitable that advances in scientific knowledge would disprove any religion, given enough time? And if science kept advancing, if they could never know everything, then no religion could ever be eternally true. In his last sermon Paul had claimed that science had backed God into a tiny corner of the unknown; but what if known science was the tiny corner, and the unknown lay vaster than anyone had imagined? If so, how could any religion ever claim to be compatible with science?