Religion and Science are two very different activities, but they are both quintessentially human endeavors.
Science is really a way of asking questions and getting answers. Scientists asks how things happen and look at antecedent causes to find the answers. But answers in science are provisional – never final. For instance, Issac Newton's Theory of Gravity was supplanted two hundred years later by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
That's why scientific knowledge is made up of theories, not immutable decrees. Scientific knowledge is ever growing and never completed. This is different from religion where if someone adds new revelations to established scripture, it often becomes a separate religion with separate adherents, like Mormonism.
Religion, is also a way of asking questions and getting answers but it asks the question “Why?” rather than “How?” because it is really about meaning and purpose in our lives.
We are the only religious species because we don't do well if we don't have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Science can also give one a sense of meaning and purpose but, because science is provisional – it doesn't give the same sense of security that religion does.
One of the reasons that science and religion conflict is because they are both about life, and life, as we have discovered, is about maintaining itself. Life is intrinsically purposive. Living creatures try to keep on living for as long as possible; They try and begat progeny; They behave purposefully.
Science has subtle problems with this because it doesn't like asking questions about purpose – that's too subjective. It would rather ask questions about physical causes.
One of the main reasons a lot of people are uneasy with scientific descriptions of life is that they sound too mechanistic and meaningless. You can get the impression from strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, that life just happened to evolve purely by chance.
This offends our religious sensibilities – it certainly offends mine. Since everything about life is purposeful, I don't see how the evolution of life could all be due to chance.
But that's a religious approach, not a scientific approach. The questions: “Why does life exist?” and “Why am I here?” - that sort of thing.
I like to think that I'm here for a purpose, that the universe begat life for a purpose, that there is a meaning to life. These are concerns about my subjective experience, about my participation in life.
Science is trying to be objective, trying to approach the ideal of objectivity - which it never quite reaches, because it is provisional and never final. Science is largely uncomfortable getting mixed up in “subjective experience” But that's OK because we've got religion and our religious propensities to deal with the subjective.
We can be uneasy about mechanistic explanations of evolution and human behaviour, but some people go to the extreme of denying the existence of evolution and global warming.
When people deny that life evolved they are taking Martin Luther's extreme position that the holy scriptures trumps every other human authority, including and especially Science.
The people who wrote the Bible were not scientists, they were not really interested in the question of causes and evidence for causes. They were interested in religious questions about who we are, why we are here, why do bad things happen to us, and what happens after we die.
The people who wrote the Bible were fundamentally people. Therefore they had axes to grind, they had personal and political reasons for writing the things that they did. No living person is immune from this, especially not people who claim to be inspired by God, as recent events testify over and over again.
Whoever wrote the book of Genesis was not writing a scientific description of how life originated. He or she, was trying to get people to observe the Sabbath.
God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So we should observe one day in the seven day week as a holy day. That's what that story is all about. This writer had ulterior motives as do all other writers.
When scientists ask questions such as: “How old is the human species?” and “Where and how did humans originate?” , the answer from Genesis, that God created the world in six days seems to be more a way of telling people to shut up and stop asking inconvenient questions, than a way of pushing inquiry forward.
The evidence is all around us that life is constantly changing, that life is incredibly old, that the Earth is incredibly old, and that we, as the human race, are not all that old. We should have more respect for our elders.
very thought provoking indeed
ReplyDeleteThe Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning
ReplyDeleteNov. 3, 2024
An illustration of a lit up house among trees shrouded by space with stars in the distance.
By Paul M. Sutter
Dr. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist.
Nietzsche was wrong: When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss does not gaze back into you. Instead, the void remains silent, relentless and frightening in its enormity. But when we peer into the infinite blackness that defines the expanse of our universe, we are offered a choice. We can recoil in fear and disregard our humanity in the face of sheer cosmic dread. Or we can transform the shadows of the cosmos into a light that illuminates the uniqueness of everything we know here on Earth.
I’m a cosmologist, the kind of scientist who studies the origin, history and evolution of the universe. I have spent my career researching one special part of the universe called cosmic voids: the vast expanses of nothing that stretch between the galaxies. Most of our universe is void — somewhere around 80 percent of the volume of the cosmos is made of nothing at all.
By strict accounting of cosmic abundances, our planet and the life we find here amount to essentially zero. Insignificant. A small speck of blue and green suspended in an ocean of night, a tiny bit of rock and water orbiting just another star. The great forces that shape our universe have grown the voids over billions of years, and their present-day monstrousness puts cosmic insignificance into stark relief. Forget planets and stars; at these scales, even mighty galaxies are reduced to mere dots of light.
There is a temptation, when faced with the true scale of the empty cosmos, to look at our tiny world with nihilism. To feel that our great achievements amount to nothing. That our history fails to leave a mark. That our concerns and anxieties are rendered meaningless. That our very humanity is reduced to irrelevancy.
ReplyDeleteI have spent years working to understand what cosmic voids teach us about the wider universe and its history. And in the course of my studies, I have learned to reject that temptation.
Yes, the universe is mostly void, but we have found many wonders in those great expanses. The voids don’t simply exist; they define and provide contrast to the galaxies that surround them. The properties of the voids — their shapes and sizes and so on — reflect the mysterious forces that govern the evolution of the universe. Within the voids we find the occasional dim dwarf galaxy, like an oasis in the desert. And we have found that the voids are brimming with cosmic energies that may someday overwhelm the rest of the universe.
It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor long-lived. But that is only one way of measuring significance. Compared with the voids, there is something special happening on our planet. Despite decades of searching, Earth is still the only known place in the entire universe where conscious beings raise their curious eyes to the sky and wonder.
Sutter, continued: Earth is the only known place where humanity exists — where humanity can exist. It is the only known place where laughter, love, anger and joy exist. The only known place where we can find dance, music, art, politics and cosmology.
ReplyDeleteOur disagreements and jealousies and all the beautiful complexities that make us human aren’t meaningless. The presence and dominance of the cosmic voids guarantee the opposite — the stories and experiences we fill our lives with are special precisely because they will never happen in the empty expanse of most of the universe.
I have learned that the same lessons that cosmic voids teach us are found in the voids we encounter in our own lives. Voids sharpen and define; they create contrast; they are full of potential. The pain we feel from loss is the last reminder of the gift of a life deeply loved. The silence before a performance begins is sparkling with electric anticipation. Our choice to ignore anxiety-inducing news is necessary to allow us to focus on what matters.
Artists and philosophers have long understood the power of the void. The 12th-century Buddhist monk and poet Saigyo reflected on the gaps between falling raindrops, noting that the pauses between their sounds were just as important as the drops themselves, if not more so. The composer John Cage challenged us with “4ʹ33ʺ,” a performance consisting entirely of silence, creating a manifestation of the void that audiences sought to fill with awkward coughs and nervous laughter, which became its own music. The famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas celebrated the utility of negative spaces, proclaiming, “Where there is nothing, everything is possible.” For the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the void was a psychological space that we must enter to realize our full potential and forge a new life.
Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.
Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.