Deborah Hill Cone: Faith - it's wherever you find it

Opinion

I have learnt a lot this week. It is easier to throw up when lying down. Sex is good for prostate cancer. Trackside is on Channel 35. It's a wonderful world. Never say no to lunch. Expensive sunglasses always get lost. People will surprise you. Oh, just stacks of useful stuff.

And isn't it super to learn new things? I don't mean humdrum info like how to boil an egg. Just that we all need to discover our own truths. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. A truth is only a truth until you organise it and want everyone else to believe it too. Then it becomes a lie. Or worse, an instrument of control. Christianity in its early form was subversive because it emphasised individual judgment. Then it got bossy.

I have sympathy with my friend Bryan Spondre, who got into trouble when he wrote a blog saying religion is a form of organised psychosis. He may be right, but what he failed to point out was that the most powerful organised psychosis these days does not worship God but the environment: the Godless religion of global warming. Or rather, climate change. (The title is clever: you can't disagree that the climate is, undeniably, always changing.)

There is something instantly objectionable about any concept that someone declares to be true, and defies anyone to disagree with it. I only just realised that I once met the father of this new religion, Sir Crispin Tickell. The largely left-wing climate change sect might be aghast to know their hero is a scientist who had the ear of Margaret Thatcher. I sat next to him at dinner in our college in Oxford. It was one of those posh dinners where you all file in after the the dons. I embarrassed myself by sitting down before grace was said.

As I said, I'm not big on religion, however it is clothed. As Emeritus Professor John Brignell has pointed out, climate change is a faith rather than a science. Religion demands belief, while science requires disbelief. There is a great variety of faiths. Atheism is just as much a faith as theism. There is no fundamental clash between faith and science - they do not intersect. The difficulties arise, however, when one pretends to be the other.

Real science does not talk about facts; it talks about observations, which might turn out to be inaccurate or even irrelevant. And you can choose what observations to make. As the late David Foster Wallace wrote: "It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship."

The other day someone asked me what I worshipped. Freedom, I said. Which is a bit of a meaningless answer. David Foster Wallace again: "But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

So that's what I have learnt. But don't believe what I say. Remember, you can only find your own truth. Time to go and start your own cult of one.

deborah@coneandco.com