Science
is the Ultimate Religion
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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. |
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