It is not a war of science against religion. It a war within ourselves.
Literature is old, science is new. Cuneiform on clay started 5,500 years ago, modern science didn’t show until 3,000 years later.
Though the infancy of empirical investigations was birthed in Greek times, its rebellious adolescence that was the Scientific Revolution started around 1550 (above: a painting of Copernicus). It wasn’t long before those who ruled the providence of the established literature (at the time almost all of it religious) saw this new way of thinking as a threat to their social dominion. Knowledge started to burst out from everywhere colliding with the controlled explanations of the day.
And so began the uneasy space between the new and the tradition and the two natural states juxtaposed in man. One fueled by a hard-wired curiosity and ambition wired in our brain and the other from a soul that savors tradition and comforts in order and the predictable. A soul helps find our way teamed with a mind that helps us wander away from it.
Science has continued to be the driving force in what expands our species. Science and its cousin of implication (and joined at the hip) technology constantly stirs the culture pot. It jostles around our sense of order brewing new possibilities and unintended consequences. Culture moves forward but continues linked with what doesn’t change. The readings of Homer reveal a literary truth; our knowledge might expand but our emotions stay grounded in our core. Culture is about humanity anchoring best we can on a world that spins. Science makes the spin faster.
So lets talk about Science. It is at war with our religion only in the same way change and new information is at war with our traditions. Science is not a set of facts but a process. It is profoundly a human endeavor full of discarded assumptions and sudden turns. It is littered with wrong ideas. But wrong isn’t the right word. It’s simply a new idea replaced by a better one, an evolution breeding better answers. Knowledge rests no where but stays suspended on a thousand hands in a steady flux of breadth. Yet it is a thin fabric; only a momentary understanding in words and numbers. “Everything known is only some kind of approximation” said Richard Feyman. The library stacks are just a scaffolding of understanding built around a real world, a facade of words and theorms. Understanding can only pierce so deep. Culture helps us go deeper while science heads in every direction like universe expansion itself. Faith and belief roots us into an understanding and a place, science follows evidence and takes us everywhere. It is a difficult thing to be in two places at once.
The clash between religion and science is a phrase that externalizes the inherent clash within ourselves. We have been gifted an inquiring brain, it has built this world and taken us into space. Our understanding expands on what happened before we arrived and what will transpire in the future. Our knowledge fixes our place among the moving stars but doesn’t explain why they are there. Science is good about the how but the why remains just out of its reach.
Science is a process and knowledge a moving target...but the soul is a thing. We are part wired to wonder why and part wired to believe. Life forces us to find balance in the place between, unable to ignore either. Culture helps define our beauty and help explain who we are but the core of every world religion rests in an individual soul. Religion and science are not at war. It is just a phrase that embodies our humanity. Part of us wants to wander the stars, part of us want to stay rooted to the ground. We are both at the same time. Both of these things as the world spins around a fixed star.
No comments:
Post a Comment