Science VS. Religion
December 19th 2008 10:26
It would be needlessly tacky to start this post with a few lines of ring announcer type dialogue. So I won't. What I will say is that for a long time man has known that there is some kind of order to the world that can be explained through observation (the earliest recorded scientific data is sometime around 35th century BC, being Mesopotatmian clay tablets) and that there is also some kind of things he cannot explain, including things like right and wrong.
Science, according to my Uni Lecturer, is built upon what is called the PEL model. Pre-supposition, Evidence and Logic. The basic presuppositions of science are that:
1. First, there is a kind of system or natural order to the world.
2. It is physically provable.
3. We can test that it is physically provable.
This is what he called the "faith" of science (his words, not mine). THis being said, there is a lot that science can prove. It can prove that evolution happened and that it works. Fair enough (admittedly, I haven't looked into this and I've been told by doctors on both sides that it is both provable and that it has gaps). It can prove that there is, at the time of this writing, somewhere near one kilogram of bacteria in each human body. It can prove that gravity exists and exerts a certain mount of influence on the universe around us. Science is able to prove what can be physically tested. No more. No less.
But it cannot prove, or disprove the existence of God. And it isn't supposed to. The purpose of science is to test and plumb the depths of our physical universe. And it is exceptionally good at this. In the past 100 years we have gone from flight to space flight. We have gone from coal to nuclear fission. We have gone from cutting things off, to the point where we can now put things back on. Admittedly, a lot of these advances have come along when we have been trying to conquer and subjugate each other, but I am not blaming science for that. Science has helped us start to embrace the full potential of the atomic age. We are now more medically advanced than ever before.
But who has been responsible for the growth of the human soul? Who has it been that has done the most to help the most? Has being able to physically prove that people need to eat meant that people are more willing to share their food? No. But organisations like child fund, world vision and compassion were all started by christians. We have, thanks to science, figured out how to kill each other more efficiently, and how to bandage ourselves up more efficiently (though we are better at the first than the second). But it was a christian man who began the Red Cross. Martin Luther King was a christian. Martin Luther (the German one) was a christian. Ghandi said that he embraced all faiths (doctrinally speaking noy possible, but I see what he was trying to do). WIlliam WIlberforce, the man that made slavery illegal in the UK was a christian. I have used mainly christian examples because they are the ones that I know. If I have offended anyone of any religion I apologise. Any omissions are due strictly to ignorance.
I am not going to go into the ways that religion has tried to tell science what it's job is. Religion's job is not supposed to say that science has any other doctrine other than to concern itself with the physical universe. In other words, have fun finding out what you find out. But the job that religion does have, is to tell us how to live. By this I do not mean to say that we should all think the same. A healthy religion should be comprised of people that think very differently. We should love ourselves and our neighbours. We should forgive, not try to strike back. We should look to those around us and consider them before ourselves. We should look for a chance to lift those that have been thrown down. Without prejudice, without discrimination.
JZ
Science, according to my Uni Lecturer, is built upon what is called the PEL model. Pre-supposition, Evidence and Logic. The basic presuppositions of science are that:
1. First, there is a kind of system or natural order to the world.
2. It is physically provable.
3. We can test that it is physically provable.
This is what he called the "faith" of science (his words, not mine). THis being said, there is a lot that science can prove. It can prove that evolution happened and that it works. Fair enough (admittedly, I haven't looked into this and I've been told by doctors on both sides that it is both provable and that it has gaps). It can prove that there is, at the time of this writing, somewhere near one kilogram of bacteria in each human body. It can prove that gravity exists and exerts a certain mount of influence on the universe around us. Science is able to prove what can be physically tested. No more. No less.
But it cannot prove, or disprove the existence of God. And it isn't supposed to. The purpose of science is to test and plumb the depths of our physical universe. And it is exceptionally good at this. In the past 100 years we have gone from flight to space flight. We have gone from coal to nuclear fission. We have gone from cutting things off, to the point where we can now put things back on. Admittedly, a lot of these advances have come along when we have been trying to conquer and subjugate each other, but I am not blaming science for that. Science has helped us start to embrace the full potential of the atomic age. We are now more medically advanced than ever before.
But who has been responsible for the growth of the human soul? Who has it been that has done the most to help the most? Has being able to physically prove that people need to eat meant that people are more willing to share their food? No. But organisations like child fund, world vision and compassion were all started by christians. We have, thanks to science, figured out how to kill each other more efficiently, and how to bandage ourselves up more efficiently (though we are better at the first than the second). But it was a christian man who began the Red Cross. Martin Luther King was a christian. Martin Luther (the German one) was a christian. Ghandi said that he embraced all faiths (doctrinally speaking noy possible, but I see what he was trying to do). WIlliam WIlberforce, the man that made slavery illegal in the UK was a christian. I have used mainly christian examples because they are the ones that I know. If I have offended anyone of any religion I apologise. Any omissions are due strictly to ignorance.
I am not going to go into the ways that religion has tried to tell science what it's job is. Religion's job is not supposed to say that science has any other doctrine other than to concern itself with the physical universe. In other words, have fun finding out what you find out. But the job that religion does have, is to tell us how to live. By this I do not mean to say that we should all think the same. A healthy religion should be comprised of people that think very differently. We should love ourselves and our neighbours. We should forgive, not try to strike back. We should look to those around us and consider them before ourselves. We should look for a chance to lift those that have been thrown down. Without prejudice, without discrimination.
JZ
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