For good historical reasons science and religion have
clashed and struggled for “dominance.” While science continues to construct and
test theories of various kinds and religions continue to develop dogma that
must be accepted, there will always be conflicts between some of the two. The
real surprise for me is that often they can both be “right” because they are
talking about two different determinations of “truth.”
What I learned in school was that truth is “that which
corresponds to reality.” Two words here require some understanding: “
corresponds” and “reality.” The basic idea is to get to an understanding of
what one means when two suggested “truths” correspond. Is it just when they
agree completely and are identical? Can one be in terms of physical observation
and the other the result of philosophical reasoning? Can one just be believed
because of a majority of human common sense and experience and the other from
isolated revelations? Does one believe in causative factors which are not fully
understood and the other relies on innate belief?
Had enough trouble? Let’s look at “reality.” Is that the
object of identical physiological reactions in a majority of people. C an they
be measured with instruments that scan the electrical and chemical processes of
human brains and nervous systems? Or is reality an approximate agreement,
expressed with sounds and physical markings that we call “language” that seem
to indicate two or more humans are having approximately the same “physical experience?”
Or is an approximate emotional experience, also identified through language or
perhaps based on the reaction of a number of people from exposure to the “reality?”
Or is “reality” an interpretation (and perhaps unique to each individual) to
sensory inputs to each person?
My answer: I don’t know.
Over the years, however, I have been struggling to
understand, for myself, what this
whole concept could mean. I can’t say with certainty (another slippery concept)
that what I currently believe is IT, or if it will still be at the point where I die
and cease to wonder ….. maybe! But here
I go.
Sometimes, I think, two things that appear to be in conflict
don’t have to be, and perhaps are not. I’ll look at just one example. Christians,
for the most part believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. [A huge aside: I
believe this came to be stated as such through a mistranslation of a word in
one of the Hebrew scriptures during the course of copying and translating the
Hebrew writings to Aramaic and/or Greek by scribe after scribe into what would
become a Christian Gospel . I also think the passage used was not prophetic in
any way, but was a statement of a completed event, namely, the birth of a child
from a young woman who had not had any children previously. Don’t quote me that
mistranslation as “proof.”]
Science would tell us that a virgin cannot give birth. Birth
requires development of a human being, or any animal that requires contribution
of egg and sperm, from two different animals. How about religion? Christians
will tell you that since God is the creator, and created the universe as a
result of will, God can do anything in the universe, including causing an egg
of an animal to be “impregnated” with a created sperm and become a decendent of
that animal. In this case, a human son of a woman. And why not? With a basic
belief that there was a creator of everything we can perceive or reason to, we
can accept (and could even be right) that a woman can become pregnant with a “holy”
operative development of a person. Here I use the term “holy” in its full sense
of something that is separate from the non-holy; in this case it would be the
spiritual from the physical.
This isn’t a completely unheard of idea. Many pagan
religions tell stories of persons who were part human and part god-like through
a human/god sexual joining; the Greeks and Romans accepted this as a legitimate
concept and the stories become part of their scriptures, which we call “myth.”
So here science and religion co-exist as both being “true.”
One is based strictly on human experience and the other is basic on faith and a
logical requirement to other events and relationships that are known or also
believed. My point here is that both can co-exist and be “true” in their own
conceptual framework.
I remember my stumbling around in my own mind trying to
understand my teacher telling me that one can say “two things plus two things
are four things … unless you are talking about vectors.” Which, in that case of course, can
be anything from minus four to plus four.
I will follow this ranting with the creation event of the
Big Bang in the frameworks of science and religion with my own wrinkle that
makes them compatible in my next post.
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