| I don't usually wax so philosophical on my LJ. Apologies it if this gets weird on anyone. But recently, I found myself unwittingly staring at the juxtaposition of science and religion. A few days ago, while I was working, a couple of Mormons stopped in to look around, dressed in their door-to-door-spread-the-word-of-God attire. This only a couple days after another customer had asked me "hey, have you ever had anyone come in here and insist that everything in this store is fake because the Earth is only 6000 years old?" So when the Mormons came in, I felt my spine stiffen and I readied myself for an uncomfortable conversation. Luckily, like almost everyone else who comes in the door at work, they had just come in to look around at the pretty things.
And, yes, I have since spent some time thinking about my seemingly irrationally guarded reaction to these two shoppers' presence, even though it was purely in my own head and never went any further than that. But that's largely an internal thought process that would likely bore most people. I digress.
This post is really about science versus religion and why I say people really need to calm down about it. I've often said things along the lines of "God is the who, science is the tool," particularly when it comes to the controversy of evolution versus intelligent design. But that doesn't quite sum up the way I feel about the whole thing.
There were a number of times in the process of obtaining my degree in Physics that someone challenged me to justify why I call myself both a scientist and a Christian. I had always simply tossed off some answer about how my exploration of the universe had nothing to do with my belief that God put it there. But that was just to get the conversation out of the way, a way of quickly getting back to that difficult integral, and wasn't entirely accurate.
No, the fact of the matter is that the more I learn about the universe through science, the more I am convinced that there is a hand behind it all. This is a fairly common sentiment; I know I'm not the first to come to this conclusion, by any stretch of the imagination. It stretches back at the very least to the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and back into the annals of pre-history itself.
But even saying that isn't entirely the whole story, either.
Science does strengthen my belief in God. But there's a certain amount of flow back in the other direction as well. The scientific fact of the matter is that there is a mind-boggling number of coincidental occurrences that have miraculously come together in order for it to be possible that everyone living on this Earth exists. Leaving aside the miracles of DNA coming together to make each individual person what they are, there is still a numerous number of delicate balancing acts in the organization of the physical sciences that made life and existence itself possible. The Solar System has to have exactly one star. The Sun has to be just such a temperature. Earth has to be just such a distance away from it and just such a size and have just such an amount of gravity. The planet's core has to be just such a chemical makeup in order to generate just such a magnetic field. And on and on. We have searched the stars for hundreds of years, now, and we have never found a confluence of these coincidences anywhere else. I firmly believe that while this coming together of conditions can be explored without faith, it can never fully be understood by science alone.
I search in order to believe. But I also believe in order to understand.
Yes, I believe there is intelligence behind the design of our universe. But that doesn't mean that science in meaningless. Thought and it's offspring science are God-given gifts that He has chosen to give to us through a long process of growth and change. We would be remiss if we did not use them and wasted all of that work. Science is the fleeting glimpses into the vast, unfathomable mind of the universe's designer that we have been granted at a pace determined by our own growth and readiness to understand them. By turning away from science, one turns away from that process of growth and refuses the path of change that has forever been the precedent and the law in the universe.
The universe is only an infinitesimal fraction of the mind of God. We have been given that and the means to explore it as a gift. To turn away from that gift is to turn away from the universe and to turn away from the universe is to turn away from life itself. How, then, is turning away from science not a sin? - Mood:thoughtful
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