Science is the Ultimate
Religion
|
Religion is based upon faith in the consistency of God. The Ultimate Religion is Science. “The
argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist’ says
God, ‘For proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘BUT,’
says Man, ‘The Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves
you exist, so therefore you don't. QED.’ ‘Oh
dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn't thought of that.’ And promptly vanishes
in a puff of logic. ‘Ooh,
that was easy’ says Man and for an encore goes on to prove that black is
white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.” –
Douglas Adams “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” The
learning process and our efforts to understand patterns in the world around
us is what helps us to survive. We use metaphors as
images that reflect and interpret our understanding as we try to relate to
and control our environment. The statement “I think, therefore I
am” is actually “I perceive I think, therefore I think I perceive.” Our
search for meaning (called “gestalt psychology” – pattern recognition), and
our attempts to be rational, lets us use those patterns and connections to
(hopefully) increase our chances of survival. Science is
the meticulous observation and measurement of reproducible physical
properties as we perceive them. Religion is the
conceptual body of cultural precepts that attempt to explain how and why the
world exists and provides appropriate guidelines for group behavior based
upon those precepts. Faith is the body of causal relationships
based upon assumptions beyond known causal variables. Logic is the
attempted observation and correlation of sequential events, forces, or
concepts. What
the analysis of Science sometimes fails to understand is that faith is as
essential to the human psyche as logic is essential to understanding in
Science. What Religion usually fails to understand is that faith
is only as valid as the premises upon which it is
based. Irrational Faith, not grounded in logic or
reality, becomes a Cult dependent for its survival upon authoritarian
misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and/or
misinterpretations, and destructive to both individual and group
survival. What
Religion and Science usually both fail to realize is that Science
itself is an “act of faith.” The Experimental Process of
Science is based upon the assumption that when you do something “exactly the
same” way a second time, you will get the exact same
result. Science expands its “Understanding of Reality” by making
slight changes to the Experimental Process and hopefully is able to correlate
those changes to changes in the results. Without Faith in the
consistency of the Experimental Process, or the consistency in the
measurement of those changes, Science could not exist. (The
metaphoric “Definition of Stupidity” as doing the same thing over and over
again expecting a different result, is in actuality a humble description of
the Experimental Process, because the real expectation and hope is that if
“something different happens” you will be able to go back and figure out the
causality of what was done differently.) A
discussion of God without explaining the mechanics of Faith and Logic ignores
the fact that, despite the seeming contradiction, Logic and Faith are
actually dependent upon each other. A discussion of one without
the other is detrimental to the understanding of both. This essay as metaphor is an attempt to resolve those
conflicts. Copyright© 2023 Millennium
Shulchan Aruch. All Rights Reserved. |
|
|
|
|