Dystopian novel

I don't know if it necessarily even needs to be closely related species; one way we reflect on ourselves is by personification of the living things around us. Lots of psychological projection goes on.

I find it interesting, for example, that numerous yokai in Japanese mythology shapeshift between foxes and women, felines and women. That's not a random or accidental choice of animal. It's deliberate. And speaking for myself here, femininity seems to lend itself well to the natures of cats or foxes. Though, perhaps this depends on how one first views and describes women.

Isn't belief fundamental even for science?

I believe whatever the people at the Hadron Collider say they have discovered. I don't *know*. I wasn't there, I don't understand all the science and math to prove it to myself on my own, and I don't care to either.

You literally cannot function in the world as a conscious living creature that wants to avoid pain / death without some degree of faith. In our reality, one would have to be an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being to function without belief.

EDIT: Wanted to add that Darwin's theory is a *theory*. Science is constantly changing and needing to be updated. So if you fundamentally understand that most of science is imperfect, and simply the best we got, you are no different than the person who looked at the trees, the water, the growing grains of rice, the sun, and said "this is god". Science is a new religion, and many a dystopian novel has been written on that.

Let me phrase my point in another way; I don't *literally* believe science is just another religion.

So long as people cannot be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent beings, belief and faith and prayer / hope are all going to be necessary (imo). People simply do not have all of the necessary knowledge, information, skills, and ability to explain and act purely rationally all of the time. There's also nothing about an ever increasing list of "facts" that tells us how to act.

Yes, issues involving the climate and ecosystem will not be fixed by praying them away! However, many people are in a position where they can *ultimately* do little more than pray that the people who ARE in a position to do something will actually do something, and do something that will actually fix it.

There's also this, like, opposite of the bystander effect. It's not that everybody thinks that somebody else will be the good samaritan, and ironically nobody helps at all. It's more like everybody thinks that they're THE ONLY ONE who would be the good samaritan, which would be totally pointless, so nobody bothers at all.

I would also argue that you need to have faith in the scientific method. There's no way to prove that the scientific method will be sufficient to perfectly explain every aspect and phenomenon of our reality. And while there is a long list of things that it has gotten right, there is also a long list of things that it had gotten "right" until it was discovered that it was wrong. It is a construct of humans, like math. Nevertheless, even while science was technically wrong, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people lived years, decades, entire lifetimes under the belief that it was correct.

Of course, we can make the argument (and I would agree) that science does a better job of allowing us to successfully understand and interact with the world. I just don't agree with this: "If the mass of humanity fails to rise above belief, and study the evidence based science, I fear we are doomed."

I disagree on two points. The first being that that will simply never happen. The capacity for faith, the ability to believe, is innate as well as fundamental for living.

Two: I don't think abandoning belief is even a necessary step. It's a total non-sequitur. I am quasi-religious, interested in the spiritual, the existential, and I value faith although mine is weak. Yet there is literally nothing about any of that which says I must therefore abandon science.

To word it another way, I just don't think that abandoning faith and belief is a necessary step for studying the evidence based science. The innumerable scientific studies made by Christian or other religious scientists speaks for itself.

Normally I wouldn't care enough to have a "debate" on this point, but for me as a reader to believe in your dystopia, I first have to be sold on the idea of the causes that led to this theoretical dystopia. And in essence, with all due respect, I'm saying I don't buy it.

Maybe I've read too much Kierkegaard and philosophy on the limits of pure reason lol. Even Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" which is a psychosocial text.

Well, I don't really have anything else to say other than that really. It's your story. I would like to encourage you, if you can find it in you, to try some thought experiments: like what if all available scientific projections and studies and data and research indicated that it's too late to do anything and we're all doomed? imo, the thing to do would be to act in absurdist defiance (requiring faith, belief, even sans evidence) and still acting to reverse the climate crisis.

I obviously understand that your point is to avoid that from happening entirely. But what I'm saying is that in my life faith has been the one thing that has rescued me from prisons of "fact". There is a reason why I, and many others, have healthy skepticism of science; this pandemic did more to ruin the trustworthiness and reputation of science than Creationists could have done in their wettest of dreams. That is to say, the vast majority of people I know distrust or question science, including climate science, BECAUSE of science.