A 'good book' to believe in...

Over the last few months on my way to the office I have been regularly told that I am going to hell.

An elderly woman – who, despite her years, maintained a fervent evangelical vim – looked me in the eye and told me repeatedly that unless I “accept Jesus as a personal saviour” I will go “straight to hell”.

She has moved on now, to be replaced by an altogether calmer chap who recently thrust into my hands a flyer featuring on its front cover a rather nice image of DNA. “Your cells – living libraries!” it exclaims. AWAKE is the title of the publication, and it is an attempt by the Jehovah’s Witness magazine the Watchtower to besmirch scientific endeavour. They claim within that not only is the theory of evolution bad science as it fails to meet the requirements of a theory, but that even if it did it wouldn’t be able to explain the origins of life. If nothing else they have either failed to understand – or failed to mention – the fact that this theory is not actually an attempt to explain the origins of life at all, but rather its diversity.

In doing so they have, once again, (the Watchtower has had to apologise to the scientific community before), simply lied in order to proselytize their own false doctrine. Other than outright lies, scientific evidence is often claimed by religion as evidence for their own views. As support, perhaps, for their own sacred writ. (Why the interest in evidence in the first place is, to me, a mystery. Are they not, by definition, faith based views? Would not absolute proof rather negate the need for faith?).

I don’t want to pick at the scab of old battles between organised religion and scientific endeavour – and I certainly won’t get into the polemical mire questioning religion as a force for good in the world. But I would like to posit that of the scriptures, holy books and sacred texts to which the world’s religions so often adhere, not one of them – not a single one – has been as demonstrably useful as a recently ‘published’ book developed from the work of a chemist based at Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

The Drinkable Book is an instruction manual with information on how and why water should be filtered – with the rather brilliant twist that the pages themselves can be used to filter water in order to make it safe to drink.

Dr Teri Dankovich, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, developed the technology for the book over several years. Its pages contain nanoparticles of silver or copper which, as the water passes through, kill the bacteria contained within. In trials at 25 contaminated water sources in South Africa, Ghana and Bangladesh, the paper removed more than 99% of bacteria – making it as safe to drink as our own tap water. She claims it will enable the supply of cheap clean drinking water for many people in the developing world. Incredibly, one book could filter a person’s water supply for four years.

Many of the 4,100 children under five who die each day from diarrhoea have no prior knowledge of the link between unclean water and the infections that kill them. With the Drinkable Book we have a message – and a method – of how the poorest can improve their life; a vital combination. “We know that you have to drink clean water, or you’ll get sick,” says Dr Dankovich. “But if you didn’t grow up knowing that, it sounds like this crazy idea. If you don’t see the importance of it, you won’t take action.”

Allegorical or not, turning water into wine is, I’d argue, a rather dubious parlour trick. Turning contaminated, potentially deadly water into water safe to drink…well, I know which of these ‘miracles’ I’d rather. Whilst a rejection of the materialist mind-set is often celebrated, if not demanded, by the religions following the scriptures of the world, it is just that – the very material of the Drinkable Book – which is so essential to this one.