Brothers on the same path
At the end of every “How?” is the unavoidable “Why?”, and from the “Why?” inevitably emanates the “How?” Search for efficient causes long enough, and you come to the final cause; begin at the end, and you must wonder at the mechanism of its implementation.
Yet, those who seek a peace between science and religion are content to stop here. “Let the scientists see arbitrariness where the religious see the fingerprints of a craftsman,” they say, “It’s just a choice of perspective.” But it is not mere interpretation that an order is at work in the universe. The fact is: the quanta and raw stuff of existence build up into an intelligible cosmos. Whether by the whims of probability or the hand of God, either way, there is a teleos, an ordering principle, perhaps aimless, perhaps artistic, but it is there.
The mere existence of an ordering principle already and immediately connects science and religion, but I think the resonance between them goes even deeper, at the level of their activity, for both are fundamentally involved in the explication of the given cosmos. Yes, their activities are different — remember, I say there is a resonance, not a similarity or even sameness — but somehow, in the end point of their journey and along the way in the journey itself, they are somehow ontologically related. They are brothers on the same path.
9 June, 2010 at 09:11
The force has always been there. It is humans that give it names and interpret it in their own ways. We only call things supernatural because they exceed the nature of our understanding. Religion is our artistic interpretation whereas science seeks to calculate the math. Math is the only truth, and art is how we light the way to it.
9 June, 2010 at 16:10
brothers in complete sense, both born from man and woman, they get jealous of each other when the other succeeds, they never let the other brother die out, but like many brothers when they work together it usually end up in tears.
9 June, 2010 at 21:07
I’m a great believer in both science and religion. The idea that they must always be separate comes largely from the Church. Many scientist, including mathematicians like Einstein are actually religious people. Gallileo was practicing Catholic, and his Daughter was a nun.
For me the problem comes directly from the limitations of the human body. We can only run so fast, hear within a limited range of sounds, see within a limited range of the light spectrum and live a finite amount of time yet we tend to see ourselves as more knowledgeable about Creation than anything else can possibly be. In the US we have people who truly refuse to accept the idea of evolution because they think “God” made everything just like in the Bible. Scientists frighten such people because they deal with those things that you can’t really see, hear, smell or taste.
There is a Universe out there full of things we may never know or understand, but I, for one, want to keep looking out there, learning and knowing, being awed by the amazing complexity of creation that is so far beyond the limited abilities of humans to even fully comprehend and yet all follows a complex set of laws that came from somewhere/one. We may never know and understand all the secrets of this Universe, but it is, thankfully, very human to keep wanting to find out. The origin of Religion was, after all, early peoples trying to understand what, for them, was their universe.
13 June, 2010 at 16:30
[...] have previously reflected upon the possible deep ontological resonance between science and religion. First, a remark: the [...]
2 February, 2011 at 16:20
[...] levels of true religion and true science is a shared sense of theophanic wholeness and a common teleos. But that’s not to say that the universe is indeed “made for humanity’s [...]