Saturday, June 12, 2010

Science vs. Religion -- the real question


In the outer rim of a 200 billion stars galaxy, a blue planet, earth, is traveling at a staggering speed of over 100,000 kilometers per hour. It would have disappeared in the vastness of space, if it were not for a mysterious and invisible force of gravity that keeps it orbiting, for all eternities, round a medium-size yellow sun, 150 million kilometers away. 

Every 176 years, four other planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are lined up on the same side of the sun. This was not known to the ancient astronomers and astrologers, whose picture of the universe did not include Uranus (discovered in 1781) and Neptune (discovered in 1846). This fact, however, inspired the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, when in 1977 two spacecrafts, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched to reach the aligned planets. The extraordinary photos they beamed back, and the new information they are still sending from the final frontier of our solar system, some 15 billion kilometers from home, have made this exploration a great triumph of science and our understanding of the laws of nature, without which none of this could have been achieved. 

These laws of nature: the principles of motion, action and reaction and gravity, are the very laws that started the age of scientific exploration and changed our understanding of nature forever. Although this new worldview did not directly contradict the principles of faith, it did threaten the monopoly the religious authorities enjoyed as the guardians of all knowledge, as declared, for instance, in the Council of Trent (1546): 

No one relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conception shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge their true sense and meaning, has held or does hold, or even to interpret them contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers. 

This powerful position was not to be given away without a fight; so rather than choosing to become the patrons of the sciences and embracing the new discoveries in order to strengthen faith and belief, the Church and its judicial institution, the Inquisition, chose to declare the new worldview heresy and its holders heretics. 

The birth of modern science into this environment still influences our way of thinking nowadays, nearly 500 years later. Because, while only esoteric minorities will not embrace the many improvements that only science could bring (medicine, transportation, communication, to name just a few) many still view the scientific worldview to be a threat to their beliefs. 

Is it a real threat? Must scientific and religious viewpoints collide, or can there be consistent description of the universe in which each is equally valid? These are deep philosophical questions that have been discussed for generations by religious people, scientists and philosophers. But whatever philosophical conclusions they may reach, for most of us, the real question is whether we, a society empowered by science-born technology, can afford to run our society on ancients principles devised far before the knowledge to create this technology was even conceived. 

5 comments:

goliah said...

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the Gospel and moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, Law, Baptism, the Trinity and especially the Resurrection, this new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition; it overturns all natural law ethics and theory. At stake is the credibility of several thousand years of religious history and moral teaching. What science and religion have agreed was not possible, has now become all too inevitable.

Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; 'raising up the man' correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where 'death' is ignorance and 'Life' is knowledge, this experience, personal encounter of transcendent power and moral purpose is the 'Resurrection', and justification for faith. Here is where true morality and perfect virtue, called righteousness begins.

Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and 'extraordinary' evidence based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new claim to revealed truth, a moral tenet not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rationally justifiable belief!

This is 'religion' without any of the conventional trappings of tradition. An individual, virtue-ethical conception, independent of all cultural perception in a single moral command, and the single Law finds it's expression of obedience within a new covenant of marriage. It requires no institutional framework or hierarchy, no churches or priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, dogma or doctrine and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single, categorical moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.

If confirmed, this will represent a paradigm change in the moral and intellectual potential of human nature itself; untangling the greatest questions of human existence: consciousness, meaning, suffering, free will and evil. And at the same time addressing the most profound problems of our age.

Trials of this new teaching are open to all and under way in many countries. For those individuals who will question their own prejudices, who can imagine outside the historical cultural box, with the moral courage to learn something new, and test this for themselves, to stand against the stream of fashionable thought and spin, an intellectual and moral revolution is already under way, where the 'impossible' becomes inevitable, with the most potent Non Violent Direct Action any human being can take to advance peace, justice, change and progress.

Published [at the moment] only on the web, a typeset manuscript of this new teaching is available as a free [1.4meg] PDF download from a variety of sites including:

[www].energon.org.uk

Yun Yi said...

i am always amazed and wonder why that USA as one of the most advanced country in technology and economy has the most religious societies.

Ran Fuchs said...

I wonder if it is the same part of society that achieves both? After all, US is big enough to have a small core that creates all tech, and a big population that use them without believing in the underlying science

Yun Yi said...

no, it's not the same part, of course. just wonder why it is so hard for the one part to influence the other. this leads to my assumption that most people would always need religions.
i also know so many chinese immigrants with high education (many of them are so call bio-chemists, and always phd) are turned into christians. looks like the natural science education did nothing "scientific" to them. this also makes me think that highly specialized fields in science don't really give people a true look of real science.

PSACHNO said...

Yun Yi, you ask great questions!