Every week, year in and year out, the magazines Science Today and Nature unfailingly report on new breakthroughs which are about to reveal the origins of existence, the inner secrets of the atom or the real size of the universe, notes Kevin Myers.
God does not intrude upon these grand theories, of course, for an ab initio intellectual dismissal of the possible role of a divine creator in any discussion of scientific matters is an ideological dogma for modern science.
No evidence for this is required: atheistic faith is the bedrock of the entire thesis. Science is Marxism with a Bunsen burner and the periodic tables.
The really curious aspect of this is that the people who spend their time studying the birth of the universe, or the origins of life, or the boundless infinity of subatomic particles, are in the forefront of discovering not how much we know, but how little we can ever know. Every door they open reveals another thousand doors of ignorance. Yet, far from this teaching them intellectual modesty, it does the opposite - it inculcates in them an almost insuperable atheistic intellectual arrogance.
The simplest truths about our universe dwarf our real ability to understand anything. The vastness of the universe, the empirically impossible relationship between time and space, the endless discovery of sub-sub-sub-particles even smaller than the earth-shattering, headline-making discovery of the sub-sub-particles which had preceded them should by this time have put us on the alert that we cannot really understand what is going on. No one can. No one. Ever.
Take the recent revelation - as reported, of course, in Science - that this world contains one hundred times more bacterial life-forms than science had previously thought. Instead of a thimbleful of soil containing 10,000 organisms called prokaryotes, it contains at least a million. In a garden-sized ton of soil, there are thus 10,000 trillion single-celled bacteria. So, science today declares that the universe contains around 100 billion stars. But using the prokaryotes precedent, by this time next week we might well find ourselves in the company of 10,000 billion stars.
These are not human figures, and the scientific mind has not been created that can cope with them. Paradoxically, however, the religious mind has, most especially the Hindu mind, which invented and embraced the two extraordinarily complex and abstract mathematical concepts of zero and of a possibly infinite number, lakh. For Hindus, numerology and theology are kindred branches of human thought, which, far from being in conflict, actually complement each other.
Yet in the West, religion is the one intellectual tool that most scientists rule out as a method of intellectual exploration, merely because they cannot measure or weigh its propositions. However, this is also true of the theory of natural selection. It is an abstract, with very little firm and irrefutable evidence to support its main arguments.
Religion could argue that it depends on far more substantial proof than the curious deformities of a few finches' beaks and the occasional swimming lizard. For science is sustained by a binding and blinding faith that its methods are right, just as the religion which tried to repress it once was; and modesty has been the characteristic of neither creed when in the ascendant.
The real truth is that mankind does not have the intelligence to know what happens and why it happens. We are surrounded by mystery. Take, for example, what the existence of the mobile phone now makes possible. I cannot count the number of hitherto call-free days when my land line and my mobile phone have rung almost simultaneously, with no common logic or shared stimulus connecting the calls.
My most recent double-act of telephonic simultaneity, on a day which until then was unblessed with any phone calls, consisted of one call from a friend in the British army, and another from an anonymous Provo lunatic who regularly pesters me with his ranting, half-baked imbecilities. Having told the latter that his impotence was likely to be permanent, as were his bad breath, his delirium tremens and his wife's dependence on appliances from Anne Summers, I had a chat with my army chum - and telephonically speaking, that was that for the day. No calls followed. (I'm a man, remember, and we chaps don't phone one another very much.)
Two phones calls from different countries, from different ends of the political spectrum, and not remotely provoked by the same obvious stimulus: moreover, this kind of thing happens too regularly to me to call it mere "coincidence". Some scientists attribute such phenomena of synchronicity to events in "beige" or "dark" matter. This is the universal, invisible substance which is believed to fill the gaps between atomic particles, the study of which they address with what used to be called the "chaos theory" and is now termed the "complexity theory".
Dream on you scientific boys and girls. You will no more uncover the secrets of "dark matter" with your damn-fool "complexity theory", or whatever succeeds it, than you will finally understand what is going on at the outskirts of the universe or in the heart of the atom.
As the tale of the prokaryotes shows, all human knowledge is merely interim and provisional. And only the atheistic ayatollahs of science, who steadfastly ignore the accumulated religious wisdom of the ages, pretend to intellectual certainty. But there is none; only fresh forms of mystery.
And in three weeks' time, new-born swallows, with brains the size of a match-head, will navigate their way unaccompanied to Africa. Explain that, scientists. Go on. Explain it.