As predicted, we had a great time (as it were) talking about the nature of time last night at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Antonia and David gave great presentations, Gretchen moderated with aplomb, and Angel Ysaguirre and the rest of the Illinois Humanities Council crew organized the whole thing with practiced professionalism.

I was happy to have a chance to catch up with David, who has become semi-famous for his appearance in the movie What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (known informally as “What the Bleep?”). This movie was a travesty of a docu-drama, the basic gist of which was to push on an unsuspecting public certain New Age ideas about how quantum mechanics allows human consciousness to affect reality. David was interviewed by the filmmakers for hours, in which he patiently explained that everything they were saying was wrong. They then sliced his words to make it look like he was agreeing with the spirit of the movie, creating a willful misrepresentation of his views in the final product.

But since I last saw David in December, he had attended an event in Santa Monica in February featuring all of the speakers from the movie (such as Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who is available for consultation for an appropriate fee). Although billed as a “conference,” it was really an excuse to sell expensive tickets to hundreds of gullible New Agers. The conference organizers were a different group from the filmmakers, who belatedly informed them that this was one person they should have left off the guest list — but too late.

After some hesitation, David decided to go, and thought very carefully about the talk he would give. I can’t do justice to the precision with which he worded his presentation, but the basic message was essentially this: “When you are trying to figure out how the world works, there are two ways to proceed. One is to invent a story about Nature which serves to say something flattering about yourself. The other is to listen to the story that Nature itself tells, no matter what it may turn out to be. What you are doing is the former; science is the latter.”

He was aiming specifically at pseudo-scientific mysticism, but I can’t think of a better characterization of the really fundamental difference between science and religion. There are differences in methods, and of course there are differences in results. But the most important distinction is in the initial attitude one takes toward the world. Real scientists will take what Nature tells them, and make sense of it as honestly and courageously as they can, regardless of what it says about their own place in the cosmos. If there was one lesson that we could spread through science education, that would be my choice.

The punchline was the response from the California audience. The other personalities on the speaker list were of course outraged, and attacked David in increasingly strident tones. But the audience, after the initial shock wore off, quickly took his side. Not really because they had become convinced of the superiority of reason and evidence to mysticism and quackery, but because they had transferred their reverence from the modern-day shamans to the philosophy professor from Columbia. They had found a new guru, who spoke more convincingly than the old ones. The more important lesson, that finding the right guru isn’t really the path to enlightenment, remained elusive.