| The Divine Workshop |
[Jan. 5th, 2009|10:21 am] |
I am by no means a religion-hostile atheist. In fact I'm not so much an agnostic even as I am a "spiritual generalist". So in reference to this post on the subject, I thought I'd talk about my feelings on the Divine, and how it relates to science, our quest to understand the world.
First, Science:
Science is not a discipline where one is seeking a mind behind the facts of the world. It does not seek a mind because it is defined backwards. Science starts with the senses and projects backward, using reason, as far as is reasonable to do. Because science is concerned with observing and guessing and observing, in a loop, it will not come to the "mind of god" but indirectly: science looks at the workbench, and at the tools, and at the joins in the wood made, we might imagine, by divine hands. Assuming there is a higher order, the scientist will at best see the way the creator's hands move over the bench, and it may please one to guess at what sort of craftsman the creator is, but doing so is to move beyond science*.
To, it so happens, Religion:
Religion then is a different sort of discipline, in that its practitioners are trying to look up past the table upon which we have been constructed and see the face of the creator, and know this mind and maybe, just maybe, contact it. Religion is a hopeful mewl in the darkness, expecting an answer and possibly even receiving one, which may go to observation of the physical world, not with the technical eye for what the joints in the wood look like, but in a quest for the sort of mind that would want these things, to imagine what a divine mind that crafted such a thing would be thinking when it did so. To have a religious feeling is to assume that there is a creative mind at work in the universe, and to hope for some kind of relationship with it.
Science is a testament to our cleverness and imagination. Religion is an expression of our need for companionship and our love of our world.
*To address the concerns of more hard-line atheists, I am well aware that science increasingly discovers how readily randomness may explain the creation of a universe where we could exist-- how a universe acting without order and without purpose could be expected to look a lot like ours. But obviously, this too *could* be explained as an act of meta-creation: there could well have been a God who decided to create a universe of universes where the forces of randomness itself would press together patterns like ours. I put it to atheists that guessing whether or not this is the case isn't science, regardless of which answer you pick. |
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| Comments: |
Mmm, yes. You have put it down well. :) They go together but they don't replace one another.
The big problem is really (I was going to write this but it was getting really really long) that science will often buck part of a religion right off the rails. The Abrahamic religions have as part of their tradition a set date for the age of the earth. However, we can find very sound evidence that this date is wrong, not just incrementally but qualitatively. Religion started out as filling the role both of religion AND science, so all religions carry with them dogmas that must either deny science, or change.
This has been a point of some controversy, obviously. | |
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