Well regarding the Moon, there’s two quotes that are of interest to this question.
“Yuri Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there”
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
It’s kinda funny how opposing these seem, though both probably had an underlying motivation. As for what I think… Regardless of whether you’re religious and which religion that’d be, the concept of heaven could be that there’s a reward for you for good behavior in life. Though, you can ask yourself the question whether a reward in life is more valuable than a reward after life. The Christian version of this is that the after-life is eternal, thus your reward for good deeds in life would be immeasurably greater than one during life itself. The uncertainty of whether you’d get there would be the ultimate motivation.
If we replace ‘heaven’ with the blissfulness of a fulfilling life on earth, I think that the original Ask becomes much clearer. Science can improve our ability to communicate, our health, our food and drinks, and our entertainment. Though, what it can’t do is make us a better person, help us to be a better friend, brother/sister, or parent. With regards to science, I’m most familiar with medical science. The topic I can bring to your attention is “medicalization of society”. Medical sciences bring us the good, though they also add the dynamics of medical capitalism into our society; i.e. “pathologization" or pejoratively ”disease mongering“. It’s more correct to refer to this as ”overmedicalization“, though. What I mean by this term is that an industry which profits on pathologies, will probably attempt to increase the rate of diagnoses, to get more people to buy their drugs or use their medical services, under the guise of improving health. The very concept of (the acceptance of) normality can be employed as a marketing gimmick. Regardless of the critique on overmedicalization, it’d be unwise to reject the benefits of diagnoses, drugs, and medical services. It would be an unfair discussion to argue overmedicalization versus undermedicalization. I don’t even have a solution to it. I personally find it bizarre that for example 5+% of the Western European population is using some form of anti-depressants right at this moment. You can look at this and conclude that it’s good for so many citizens to have access to pharmaceutical support for their health issues. Though, you can also look at this and conclude that there is a mental health crisis raging throughout populations which either exists for real, due to massive over-diagnosis, or due to over-prescription of these drugs. This pattern continues also into other pathologies.
The question here is whether all these medical-scientific advancements have brought us closer to ‘heaven’, i.e. closer to feeling fulfillment in our lives. My own answer is that it’s unrelated to one another. Superficially you can answer that health is a huge part of happiness, and that you’d wish for your family and friends to live long and healthy lives. Though, does that imply that life was less fulfilling and happy in the past? 200-300 years ago there were many more hardships e.g. infant mortality. But what I want to bring to your attention that hygiene, quality food and clean drinking water probably played the biggest role in the advancements herein, followed closely by vaccinations.
I don’t have a definitive answer for you. Science is a tool to generate new knowledge, and that knowledge can be used to help us. Though, I don’t think that the generated knowledge can be part of happiness itself, at least not in a vacuum. If you can contribute to this monologue, please feel free and I’ll be happy to revise my opinion.
