History, Daddy was saying, has seen thousands of religions, millions of cults, billions of individual belief systems. All of them have been a search … - Ken Wharton

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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."