Spiritual and religious people are frequently obsessed with innocence. This can be viewed more generally as an obsession with purity, which is psychologically grounded in fear of chaos and impermanence, and particularly in characteristic refusal to accept mortality. An honest scientist will tell you that all physical things are impure, impermanent, and constantly changing, and that anything living will soon be dead.
Even 24-carat gold is full of impurities. A typical 5-gram wedding ring contains roughly a billion trillion atoms of gold. How shall we determine that the ring contains only those atoms? Even if we had a means of counting individual atoms at our disposal, it would take vastly longer than the universe will exist to count them all. By the time we finished counting, not only the ring, but the universe itself would long since have disintegrated.
Science accepts the approximate nature of things and responds to it constructively with error bars, which are ranges of statistical probability. Science is our only source for predictive explanations of phenomena, and our explanations have become sophisticated in part by properly measuring and accounting for uncertainty.
Obsession with purity is unpragmatic, comparable to the proverbial counting angels on the head of a pin. The useful question is not how pure a thing could be, but how pure we need it to be, and for how long, because nothing stays the same. Nearly all the cells in your body will be replaced within seven to ten years. You may feel like the same person ten years from now, but technically, you’ll be a clone of yourself.
Only in the domain of mathematics do we find purity. Zero is pure, just as one is pure. Pi is conceptually pure, even though we could never calculate all of its digits. It is the immateriality of numbers that allows them to be pure. The Pythagorean theorem was true before we existed, and will still be true after we’re gone. It was always true, and it will always be true.
The objective truth of mathematics gives little comfort to the spiritual and religious, however. Zero’s purity does not prevent illness or death. Most of the universe can only be conjectured about, based on radiation it emitted, remnants of which collide with us billions of years later. Nonetheless, we have gathered enough information by now to reach a few conclusions: the universe is messy, vast and violent, and utterly indifferent to our fate. Some of us may be more or less innocent, but none of us will be saved.
For those who yearn to be saved, mathematics will not do. Only the soothing fictions of spiritual and religious dogma can shield timid souls from the harshness of existence. The bravest of us face existence squarely, and in doing so, learn to differentiate what is real from mere illusion. The prize of understanding even a small aspect of reality is surely worth considerable struggle, particularly if by sharing that understanding with others, a more comprehensive understanding gradually accrues. This is, after all, the promise of civilization.
