Science must prevail over superstition

May 29, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- There are tragedies which break the heart, and then there are those which break the mind. The drowning of an eleven-year-old girl is a catastrophe that ought to unite a country in sorrow and resolve. But here we are watching a circus of suspicion, with every act more absurd than the last.

It is a maddening thing—this modern Guyanese contempt for science. In the days of superstition, people knew no better. You saw ball of fire in the sky and concluded it was Ol’ Higue. Your feet became swollen and you assumed a toad blew wind on it.

But now, with the advance and spread of science such superstitions and beliefs should have long been abandoned. But no, there are still too many persons who place superstition before science and belief and feelings over proof and reason.

The pathologists who performed the autopsy on the child were trained hands with reputations that cross oceans and disciplines. They have offered their findings. Not unfounded opinions, not intuitions, but results: cold, careful, deliberate.

But these findings are not what the mob wanted. No. They wanted a different story—one with villains who conveniently fit their private prejudices and frustrations. They wanted a fable, not a fact. So, when science failed to echo their inner outrage, they turned on the scientists. They did not ask, “What does this evidence show?” They asked, “Why doesn’t this evidence confirm what I already believe?”

The lesson here is not new. The Greeks warned us. They told us of Cassandra, whose curse was to speak the truth and never be believed. Today, Cassandra has a PhD, a microscope, and twenty years of post-mortem expertise—but the fate is the same. Her truth is shouted down by people with no training but boundless conviction.

This is the tyranny of gut feeling—the unwashed notion that truth should conform to the stomach, not the skull. We now live in an age where someone’s hunch is thought to outweigh another’s years of knowledge, where conjecture trumps expertise. Those who cry the loudest for justice are often those least interested in how it is done.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, what did we see?  We saw grief and concern. But we also saw more than grief and concern. We saw the fever of accusation – accusation without evidence. They turned their eyes not to the preliminary report of the pathologists but to rumor and hearsay. Now everyone in a photograph is a potential suspect.

They demanded explanations, and when the most rational ones arrived, they spat them out like children refusing medicine. It did not taste of the drama they desired. It did not align with or could it justify what was done – the accusatory fingers pointed at others, the looting and burning of a business and the arson committed on the homes of the owner of a hotel and his neighbor. The findings of science could not be accepted because to do so would turn the villain into a victim and the mob into the antiheroes.

What those who rejected the findings of the pathologists fail to see—willfully or otherwise—is that science is not a character in a morality play. It does not care for the comforting arc of villainy and vengeance. It seeks, instead, what is. The work of a forensic pathologist is not to appease; it is to discern. The body cannot lie, and in the quiet chambers of the lab, it is the only voice that matters.

But those who lust for a narrative are deaf to that voice. And so they reach for the shadows, for the old reliables: superstition, suspicion, and slander. They attack the expert as “foreign,” as if the truth bore passports. They discredit the evidence because it doesn’t flatter their biases. They cling to what they want to be true and call it “intuition,” mistaking the internal whisper of prejudice for the external call of fact.

What a disservice this is to the child. What a desecration of her memory. For in the name of her life, they deny her the dignity of the truth. They turn her body into a battlefield, a stage for protest, a prop for anger. But anger does not yield answers. Only the scalpel does. Only the peer-reviewed, dispassionate, verifiable process of science.

It is worth remembering that belief, when it departs from evidence, becomes not faith but fanaticism. The people who today sneer at science would, in another age, have lit fires under heretics. Their hearts are hot but their heads are cold. They wear their righteousness like armor and mistake its clangor for the sound of truth.

What must we do? We must return to the habit of humility. We must remember that knowledge is earned, not improvised. We must treat the grief of others not as a drum to beat upon but as a silence to honor. And we must stop expecting that our beliefs, simply because we hold them dearly, must be true.

The truth does not owe us comfort. But in its hard, impartial light, it offers something better than comfort. It offers clarity. It offers peace, eventually. That little girl deserved that peace. Her family deserves it now. And so does the country. Let us not crucify reason on the cross of emotion. Let us not discard our compass just because it points somewhere we did not expect. In the end, all we have to hold back the night is science. And if we trade that away for superstition and suspicion, we will be left not just in darkness, but in disgrace.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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