Science and religion are glorified cooking.

Speaking to a friend of mine, who is following the teachings of a Lama, he described to me how one one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is repeatability.

In many of the Buddhist teachings such as searching for the ego that they say isn’t there, the point is not to believe, the point is to go searching for the ego and see if you can find it. You don’t need to believe what they tell you, you need to repeat the steps they tell you and verify it for yourself.

Science is about repeatability. Science is about finding ways to repeat what we see and understand it through repeating it. We see the moon moving through the sky – can we repeat the same movements? How precisely can we repeat them? In how many ways can we repeat them and what are the steps to repeat these movements.

These steps are algorithms. Algorithms are often likened to recipes, they are a set of steps to create a result.

One of the biggest scandals of recent psychology and social science is the repeatability of the studies. When people try the same steps 20 years later they don’t get the same result.

This is similar to how you tell a good recipe from a bad recipe. If you follow a good recipe exactly for the first time it will come out looking very close to the picture and tasting good.

This is one of the strengths of a cook book from say Jamie Oliver who has a team of chefs repeating his recipes, verifying them and finding what goes wrong.

So much of cooking is about the physics of heat and the biology and chemistry of proteins, fats and acids.

I think the universe is one big cooking pot. Heat and press everything to a tiny point until it explodes then wait a few billion years to see what happens.

The other end of the scale of believability that my friend told me about was the process of how a Buddhist high priest selects the next. It is a fantastic and wonderful process but impossible to repeat by others. So all I can do is trust his word. I can’t verify if for myself. In the same way my friend is repeating what he has read or been told, he can’t verify it either. Even the people who witnessed the event can’t verify it because they’ll only see part of it.

The Chinese have abused this and found their own Buddhist leader. The problem is that their story is as verifiable as selections for Tibetan Buddhist leaders – that is not verifiable at all.

Christianity has many aspects that are unverifiable and unrepeatable. But it still has a recipe at its core. The 10 commandments. The ones you can’t verify the benefit of you don’t have to follow. These can be repeated and verified. There are other phrases such as ‘turn the other cheek’, Gandhi repeated these as part of the independence of India. Those words are powerful, you don’t need to believe in the resurrection to recognise the power of those words.

So bake me a cake as fast as you can and I’ll show you something that’s worth believing in.