If asked to name the greatest collective achievement of humankind in all history, what would you say? The answer is unequivocal: science, and its applications via technology.

There is scarcely a moment in which we are not reliant on science. Think of electricity, computers, aircraft, pharmacology. Indeed, without science many of us would not even be alive.

But science is also a mindset and a method. It is based on observation and reason, and on rigorous checking. Its results are challengeable and subject to independent verification; if hypotheses fail experimental tests, or if new evidence comes along, they do not survive.

The scientific mindset lives with doubt. It knows that every question it answers results in new questions being asked, and it relishes this fact.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva involves contributions from more than two dozen countries in history’s greatest-ever experimental effort to understand the structure of matter. Pakistani and Indian scientists, Jewish and Muslim scientists, American and Iranian scientists, all work side by side to penetrate the secrets of nature. A few miles away at the UN office in the city, where everything is politics and theology, their countries quarrel bitterly.

No wars have been fought between scientists over theories in zoology or chemistry. What a contrast with the certainties of dogma, derived from ancient superstitions that purport to have answers about everything — and which can be explained to any credulous person in ten minutes. It takes a little longer to understand science; but science is infinitely more worth it.

A.C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

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