This is, apparently, going to be a fascinating century. A century in which the challenges of our science will force our ideas about ourselves and how we build civil society to make such a radical change, it could be described as evolutionary. Where it will become impossible for someone to draw conclusions about the universe and maintain them for their entire lifetime because the advances will be presenting new information not by the decade, nor by the year by in months and weeks.
It is, as the saying goes, a ‘brave new world’, words that were put into the mouth of a woman by Shakespeare who knew that in this life it is to the women that we have to look for intellectual bravery. Muscular bravery is for the men but the force that propels us to understand creation is very feminine.
I am of course always delighted to read academics when they tell me they think change is afoot (when has it not been?) and it is brave to foresee ninety years ahead, but the idea that we must evolve our thinking, how we think even maybe what we think about, seems to me to be key here. Because the battleground will become whether we decide the rational, provable and reasoned is all important or how we respond to what we what prove.
Religion isn’t dangerous because it believes in a god, it is dangerous because human beings are always ready to believe. Reason without ethics will never build us an evolved society.