Sooner or later, we all commit too many of our important belief systems as a matter of faith. It has always seemed ironic to me that we live in a time of scientific curiosity and affirmation, and we still end up with some of our most cherished beliefs as assumptions and matters of faith.
Granted we live in a time when science acts like the new God head. So many people take delight in this. I wonder if they are aware of the fact that they are making as many theoretical assumptions as our so-called religious leaders have made for hundreds of years. I know many of our postulated scientific probabilities can be demonstrated as mathematically probable, but as we know from past experience so many of these new discoveries are proved later to be wrong.
Please don’t consider this a tirade against science. I’m a firm believer, and I am most appreciative of how all of our lives have been substantially improved and enlightened because of our scientific discoveries.
What concerns me is how lightly we take the matter of faith as an important reality of our everyday lives. Obviously, religion is one of the most obvious areas where this happens. I have always been disturbed by the basic conflict between science and religion. Certainly, I can understand its origins from the perspective of how metaphors within religious traditions have been handed down to us from past generations as a literal truth. This has always raised an “eyebrow” or two.
However, surely we’ve advanced in our linear evolution of human consciousness to understand there are many points within both faith and science that allow us to come together rather than pull us apart. Simply being able to explore the cosmos today the way we do should put us all in awe. The fact that we are all stardust should give us a sense of oneness with the universe that goes beyond the equations and transcends our very being. Surely, there is a faith like quality to this that allows us to be in sheer wonder of it all.
Maybe scientists and theologians should leave their prejudices aside along with their quest for proving or disproving the existence of God as the creator of the universe to the philosophers and logicians – at least until they have more definitive information beyond theory and theology.
Brother Giovanni
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Robert Jastrow
Religion is reality while science is observation and experiment.
Posted by: Regina | 06/19/2017 at 12:03 AM