Science vs. religion. Is it really versus???
There’s a long stretch of beach near my house where I love to walk. I stride with one leg solidly scientific—looking for understandable cause and effect, consistent principles and laws. The other leg—my religious leanings—keeps comfortable pace alongside it.
I walk past the empty shell of a horseshoe crab, a very old species. Millions of years old, scientists say. Much older than Adam and Eve. But that well known allegory about human choices—about whether we’re choosing what’s truly good or just being deceived by what appears to be good—is a lesson as fresh as each new wave that crashes on the sand just in front of me. What am I choosing to guide me? Is it consistent with wisdom, benevolence, and love? Or is it seductively attractive but ultimately empty and heart-wrenching?
My scientific side enjoys the rhythms of the waves, the striations of seaweed marking a succession of high tides coinciding with phases of the moon. My spiritual side loves the unexpected treasures of sea glass, the footprints of children beside lopsided sand castles, the artistic stack of weathered rocks in a whimsical cairn—all of which show a richness to life, creative thought and expression, a delight in life that no purely mechanistic explanation can compass.
Maybe science and religion are like prose and poetry. Two different ways to describe this wonder that is life. Each enhances my ability to look at the universe through a spiritual lens and see the Cause of all as simultaneously an ever present Principle and unwavering Love.
Here is a God that embraces both science and religion.
It takes courage to take on entrenched prejudices that keep science and religion from coalescing. A breakout thinker in this arena has been Mary Baker Eddy who wrote extensively on the demand for all true religion to conform to science, to rest on Principle and be provable. And she saw that science required the vocabulary of Cause, purpose, and meaning to meet humanity’s deepest yearnings.
Early Christianity was compelling, explained Eddy, because lives were changed for the better not by mystery and miracle but by a spiritual law not then understood. An understanding of this spiritual law brings dramatic physical, moral, and spiritual restoration to any age.
Together, science and religion can spur spiritual insights that go beyond the limits of human reasoning and give us expansive views of God and the universe. It’s as if we’re at the edge of a vast ocean of understanding. Instead of just walking along the shore, it’s time to launch out into depths not yet envisioned by either science or religion on their own.
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Merci
Robin,
In our quest for scientific knowledge of the world around us and a companioning spiritual understanding of same, we will need to overcome the quaint hypothesis of the “objective observer.”
To the human mind that keeps delving into various material strata and material relationships ultimate explantions will remain elusive though we currently believe we have made great stides in extending the
“scientific data base” of the world in which we live.
My model for the scientist of the future is not much different from this portrayal of yourself contemplating objects and experiences on the beach…a wonderful metaphor.
There is a state of mind
that is a step beyond contemplation. It is more like “communion.” Jesus instructs us to “preach the gospel to every creature.” The converse is also true. Every creature (created thing) has a gospel to preach to us, if we choose to “commune with it” at a spiritual level rather than just examine it via the physical senses.
George Washington Carver is an example of the kind of “natural” scientist who, as a child, learned to commun-icate with nature’s plants. Eventually, he went on to make many chemical discoveries and scientific inventions, but in his humility he also
attributed some of his success to the ability he had
gained in letting the plants tell him about “themselves.”
Mary Baker Eddy has pointed out that each of God’s lesser creations has links to the greater ones. That “connectedness” becomes even more apparent when one approaches their quest for knowledge
by the meta-physical path of: communion with fellow beings.
On your wonderful sandy beach overlooking the ocean before you in contemplation of a new horizon of understanding….it seems you are poised to settle into a deeper state of spiritual repose that will help you transit that horizon to what lies beyond…. without ever having to get your feet wet. In my view THAT is “the next step” that will truly advance our understanding of our earthly world and its heavenly origins.
Love the deep thinking, David. Yes, communing moves us far beyond contemplating. It’s the breakthrough to profound insights on the nature of reality as Spirit-based. That broad perspective adjusts how we look at ourselves and others and the universe. Communing invokes ‘union with’ — and unity with the divine involves first the humility to give up our ‘own’ way of looking at things (stubbornly dogmatic, either religiously or scientifically) and then listening with a fully open heart and mind. Time to walk over the unstable waves of current theories and beyond the horizon of physical limits. The possibilities are breath-taking!
Robin,
Consider the following experimental design as one way to “walk….over current theories…”
Time to walk over the unstable waves of current theories and beyond the horizon of physical limits. The possibilities are breath-taking!
Consider how you would train up a child to rely on
reflected omniscence to arrive at answers to mathematical problems rather than relying on human computational methods aided or unaided by tehcnology. This seems quite feasible as a demonstration
of supra-human potential or something akin to a biblical “marvel.”
Do you know anyone that you can name in the science
field who is currently “walking….over current theories…” by using metaphysical rather than physical premises as a basis for theory and research?