A person can lie in bed, half-asleep, and watch high-definition video from a robot on Mars.

He can ask his phone how old the Earth is and get an answer—around 4.54 billion years—before the screen has fully lit his face. He can scroll past a simulation of colliding galaxies, a news article about gene editing, a chart of global temperatures, and a weather forecast stitched together from satellites that see storms from orbit.

He lives in a world that dates rocks, edits genomes, and listens to the faint afterglow of the universe’s first light.

And then, with the same untroubled certainty, he can walk into a voting booth or a pulpit or a cable studio and speak as if the planet were a few thousand years old, as if species arrived all at once by decree, as if history is a script written in advance for his group and backed by cosmic fire.

We learned the stars, and we kept the superstitions.

The scandal is not that ordinary people lack specialist knowledge. Everyone does. The scandal is that a civilization capable of this much measurement has never built what you could call a cultivated adulthood—a culture that can face reality without needing flattering myths. We use science to engineer our tools and medicine, then let our shared life be organized by older stories that put us at the center.

We have built a technical order on top of an imaginative world that often still thinks like a village.

1. Wonder is not the problem

One distinction matters from the start.

The problem is not wonder. Not prayer, not awe, not the shiver under a night sky when language fails and something in you bows.

The problem is the way stories from a pre-scientific world are still treated as if they were geology, biology, and statecraft—and handed authority over curricula, law, and war.

There is nothing inherently dishonest about ancient sacred texts. They are attempts to say what life feels like from the inside: creation and loss, guilt and mercy, exile and homecoming. Dishonesty begins when we pretend those texts were secretly doing astrophysics, or when we use them to overrule everything we have learned since.

Wonder says, “the world is deeper than I can explain.” Superstition, in the sense I mean here, says, “I already know how this works, and whatever contradicts my story must be wicked or irrelevant.”

Religion, at its best, makes room for the first. Superstition lives on the second. Once you see that line, the conflict of our time stops being “science versus faith” and starts looking more like reality versus forms of certainty that refuse to be corrected.

2. Why false certainties endure

The evidence for an ancient Earth, for evolution, for a universe in motion is neither fragile nor obscure. It comes from many directions at once: clocks in the atoms of rocks and meteorites, fossils layered in stone like frames of a very slow film, DNA patterns that bind species into one branching family, light from distant galaxies stretched as space itself expands.

You don’t need to follow every equation to grasp the outline. A decent high school education, honestly given, is enough.

Yet the older cosmologies hold on. In some places they dominate. That is not well explained by stupidity. A more accurate word is need.

The older stories do something bare fact does not do on its own. They describe a world in which someone is in charge, history is going somewhere, suffering belongs to a larger purpose, enemies will eventually face justice, and your community has a special place in the design. Take that away without offering anything equally thick, and you are asking people to stand bareheaded in a universe that does not recognize them.

To accept evolution is not only to revise a diagram of species. It is to accept that your body is the outcome of blind processes, not a singular act reserved for your kind. To accept a billions-year-old cosmos is to accept that your scriptures, if you have them, arrived very late to a story that was already ancient. Taken seriously, those truths mean there is no automatic guarantee that your tribe, your nation, your religion sits at the center of anything beyond its own imagination.

If you have not been shown how to live with that, reaching back for an older picture is not irrational. It is self-preservation.

Most people, when they argue about creation or apocalypse, are not mainly defending a theory. They are defending the feeling that reality has room for them and the people they love.

3. What modernity took—and failed to give

The scientific revolution did not simply eject God from the story. What it did, over time, was loosen the bolts that held a particular picture of the world in place.

The Earth turned out not to be fixed at the center. The sky turned out not to be a ceiling with lamps. Disease had microbes; lightning had electricity. Species changed. Continents moved. The universe itself was not hanging still in the dark but expanding.

The old map cracked.

What replaced it for most people was not a carefully built adulthood but a loose weave of work, consumption, and thin slogans. Whatever depth the old sacred order had, however mixed with illusion, was not replaced with anything equivalent.

Death moved from the village into the hospital. Mourning moved from communal ritual into professional service. Childhood moved from myth and apprenticeship into schooling and screens. The economy grew, the attention industry bloomed, politics wrapped itself in branding and spectacle.

There are exceptions—small communities, religious and secular, that still carry weight with some dignity. But in broad outline, modern life weakened inherited certainties, flooded every day with distraction and economic pressure, and offered very little formation in how to inhabit the truths it had uncovered.

That combination does not produce a population of calm rationalists. It produces people suspended between disenchanted facts and unmet emotional needs, people who are easy prey for any story that promises to pull their fear and hope back into order.

Some of those stories are ancient. Some are new. Many are profitable.

4. A necessary acknowledgment about religion

It would be convenient to treat “religion” as one thing: literalist, anti-scientific, allergic to doubt. Reality is messier.

There have always been religious traditions that read their scriptures symbolically, that accept an old Earth and evolution as descriptions of how, not insults to why, that treat myth as a way of speaking to the heart rather than a competitor to geology. There are priests and rabbis and imams and laypeople who know that humans share ancestry with other animals and that the cosmos is unimaginably old, and who find that knowledge deepens, rather than destroys, their sense of the sacred.

Even now, some of the places where people most honestly face guilt, death, and obligation are religious spaces: a small church that still sits with the dying, a synagogue that carries memory through catastrophe, a mosque that binds a scattered people into a weekly rhythm of prayer and charity. In many lives, those communities have done more to teach courage and remorse than any corporate offsite or wellness retreat ever has.

The crisis we are in is not simply that religion exists. It is that forms of childish certainty—religious and secular—still have enormous leverage over politics, education, and war. When a belief claims public authority while refusing public correction, it joins the problem, whatever language it speaks.

5. The myths below and the myths above

The most obvious superstitions are loud: a preacher pointing to a prophecy to explain an earthquake; a rally that treats a modern nation as if it were an ancient chosen people; a pundit whose foreign policy is a sermon with maps.

Those are real. They distort classrooms and ballots. But there is another layer, quieter and more polished.

The people who run banks, weapons firms, tech platforms, and ministries of finance rarely think the Earth is six thousand years old. Many have elite degrees. Quoting scripture in a budget meeting would be gauche.

Yet they, too, are held by stories. Stories in which what the market does is treated as what reality demands; in which growth on a finite planet is assumed to be sustainable if innovation is fast enough; in which “stability” abroad is a polite name for the projection of force; in which whatever keeps the system running is taken, by default, to be wise.

These are not carefully defended philosophies. They are background myths that authorize action and dull guilt. They make it easier to approve a pipeline, a merger, a bombing campaign, a new way of strip-mining human attention, and call it pragmatism.

If a rural congregation treats a prophetic timetable as beyond question, that is one sort of superstition. If a cabinet treats a quarterly line as beyond question, that is another. The first can damage science education. The second can help wreck the climate.

Honesty requires us to see both.

6. Why more science classes won’t fix this on their own

Faced with all this, the standard answer is to demand more science education, better public communication, another round of explainers on evolution and cosmology.

All of that is worth doing. None of it reaches the root.

Facts describe what is. Superstition, in the sense at stake here, is a way of managing what it feels like. It offers security, vindication, a sense of place in a drama where your side is right and the universe agrees. It takes fear and randomness and bends them into a story where you matter and the chaos will, somehow, resolve.

You can pour correct information onto that structure and very little changes, unless people are also learning how to live without that kind of reassurance.

A society that meant to grow up under this sky would not just teach how stars form and how mutations spread. It would also teach, in plain language and repeated practice, how to endure mortality without fantasies of exemption, how to live with the fact that events are often contingent and not secretly orchestrated for our character development, how to acknowledge guilt and complicity without fleeing into denial or self-loathing, how to recognize that the lives of strangers are as thick as our own even when they belong to an outgroup.

Those are not luxuries. They are exactly the inner skills that make people less hungry for simple stories.

Very few of our systems are designed to cultivate them. Schools train children to be employable and competitive; media trains them to react; the economy trains them to want; politics trains them to divide into camps. In that environment, truth feels thin and myth feels thick, and under pressure, thickness wins.

7. What an adult culture might actually do

“Adult culture” sounds abstract until you picture it.

Imagine a town where death is not hidden behind curtains and euphemisms. When someone dies, people gather not for half an hour of clichés and then sandwiches, but to speak frankly about the person’s life and about the fact that theirs will end too. No one pretends to know exactly what comes after. They talk instead about what was real while the person was here: kindness, harm, repair, failures that were never mended. Children are not kept away from this as if it were a contamination; they are allowed to see that endings are part of being alive.

Imagine schools where students learn, alongside algebra and history, what fear does to perception, how crowds can slide into cruelty, how to hear the inner itch for a simple story when reality refuses to cooperate. They read not only national myths of progress but also histories of empire, atrocity, and collapse, including their own country’s worst chapters, without the usual escape clause that says “we are different by nature.”

Imagine public speech that justifies policies by consequences rather than destiny—by the reduction of suffering, the preservation of a livable world—rather than by claims of greatness or chosenness. Pride, when it exists, would come from restraint and repair, not from victory alone.

Imagine communities that meet regularly for something other than buying, branding, or rehearsing catastrophe. People cook, argue, look after one another’s children and aging parents, share news, and sometimes sit together in silence—not because silence sells, but because silence is one of the few ways a human nervous system remembers it is part of something larger than its own feed.

None of this requires abolishing religion. In many places, the spaces that already look most like this are religious ones. What it does require is letting go of any story—sacred, national, or economic—that demands to be exempt from reality and insists that our group stands at the moral center of the universe.

An adult culture would treat that kind of claim the way a recovering person treats a familiar excuse: recognizable, tempting, and dangerous.

8. The choice under the sky

The universe we now see is vast, old, and silent about our importance. It does not write our flag into its equations. It does not suspend cause and effect because we are sincere. It does not rearrange its chemistry to spare us the consequences of what we do.

That realization could have made us modest. It could have made us slower to bless wars, slower to burn fuel as if the air were infinite, slower to treat distant lives as expendable. Sometimes it has.

But much of our public life has taken another path. We have taken the power that knowledge gave us—in energy, in weapons, in machinery, in information—and paired it with an inner world that still craves reassurance more than truth. We carry devices that could show us storms from orbit and extinctions in graphs, and we mostly use them to bathe in spectacle.

This is not an invitation to sneer at believers from a safe distance. It is an invitation to recognize how deep the temptation runs, in every camp, to imagine that we are owed an exemption: that God, or the market, or technology, or “history” will rescue us from the need to change.

Growing up, under this sky, would mean something quieter and harder. It would mean letting what we can honestly know set the outer frame of our shared decisions, allowing wonder and ritual to live inside that frame without demanding that they rewrite it, raising children—and governing adults—without telling them they are cosmically special, and building everyday habits in families, schools, workplaces, and public life that teach people how to stay with reality when it is not flattering.

We already know the age of the Earth. We already know that we are one species among many on a small planet circling an ordinary star in a galaxy among uncountable others.

The live question is whether we will remain a civilization of children wielding dangerous tools while clinging to stories that keep us from seeing ourselves clearly, or whether we can begin the slower work of becoming the sort of people for whom truth—even unflattering truth—is more precious than the comfort of feeling chosen.

That work cannot be outsourced to experts or solved by another round of innovation. It will be done, if it is done, in how we talk to our children about death, in what we reward in our leaders, in what we are willing to admit about our history, and in how often we choose to tell one another the truth when a sweeter lie is available.

We have learned the stars. The next test is whether we are willing to become the kind of creatures who can live under them without lying to ourselves—and still find the world worth loving.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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