Science or religion — the need to choose?
The debate between science and religion has become age-long. And the mindset of having to choose between the two or at least keeping them impassably apart has been burdensome on those who feel initiated by the wonderous possibilities that humanity has found in the sciences and who want to look forward to so much more yet to be explored — yet they find themselves bound in the love for an even more possible ‘God’.
What needs to be expounded is, why/if the fields of science and religion are anti-thematic to each other; why does believing in science require one to become atheistically skeptic to belief in ‘creation’; and does logic of one necessarily cancel out the logic of the other? To find this we must delve into the philosophical basis of the difference between ‘pure’ science and what we are made to ‘believe’ it is.
To start with, science, at its core, is based on three basic assumptions, that; there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers; this objective reality is governed by natural laws; and this reality can be discovered by means of systematic observation and experimentation. In essence these assumptions do not deny other objective realities that the rational observer cannot observe nor does it say anything about all the subjective realities that we live in every day, but simply that science will have nothing to do with those other realms.
But Europe, where all the Enlightenment and Renaissance happened, had become abhorrent of the dogmatic beliefs of a Church that was a complete mismatch with logic, reason and the progress that science was promising. This hate for inconsistent dogma that was simmering in Europe’s scientific and progressive community, was eventually brought forth in the Vienna Circle (1922-38) that advocated Logical Positivism (LP) — which said that “only empirically verifiable or falsifiable propositions” are “meaningful” — “everything else is nonsense”. This symbolic embrace of a purely material aspect of reality, while trashing everything else, has been a problem from the beginning, as the duality of the mind-body that we all have to practically live day in day out, defies the perception of an objective world without belief in a subjective realm that perceived it in the first place.
The thought, the conscience, the passion that drives us into inquiry and exploration, are sublime, non-objective entities, informing us of the very existence of the material world. Thought defines matter, matter does not define the thought, therefore matter and its laws are a subset of the thought. And to say that the set is necessarily equal to its subset, just because we can’t touch or smell the other things in the set, is like being stubborn and anti-science.
Religion, or at least Islam, claims to cater for the whole thought, it hints on the beginning of the material world and its end; it asserts accountability of the tangible and of the sublime heart, alike; it talks of having a count of the tiniest atomistic specks, of the heavenly bodies, and of the whispers of the inner self, alike. So, is religion as a faculty, disproven by logic and reason? Is religion a storytelling and science pure facts? Is religion dogmatic and science not?
The case of science being dogmatic is actually a case of men of science being dogmatic, especially in their earnest faith in preserving LP, no matter how much factual evidence goes against it. This tale can be traced back to Newton (1727). Known for his Law of Gravitation, the difficulty Newton faced in explaining the non-material aspect of gravity is rarely mentioned. Newton found that “bodies have an intrinsic power enabling them to attract one another from a distance, without any intervening medium”, meaning that gravity is a non-material entity. The scientific community of the time accused Newton of being an occultist for putting forth such a heretic idea and Newton ended up declaring his ignorance of gravity’s cause. Since then several forces of the sort have been discovered, yet the scientific community is not ready to approve of a force that could have put all these sublime forces into work. They approve of ‘laws’ that are perceived by consciousness but not of a conscience that perceived those laws.
Darwinian Evolution is an interesting case, scientists have consistently proven its impossibility. Renowned scientist Stephen Meyers writes, “Rarity of functional genes… versus all the gibberish… ones… is one is to 10 to the power 77”, multiply that with 10 to power 40 unique organisms yet found, and then add several or 100s of million years of ‘waiting time’ for each possible mutation — all this would need 100s of billions of years to occur, when the Universe is only about 14 billion years old, yet we keep Darwin’s theory in our text books because it supports LP.
Is this not dogmatic behavior? Has the Western scientific community not become a church of no-God?
The truth is that most of science is hypothesis — an ‘explanation’ based on available facts, later the most plausible explanations become theories, which are by principle extrapolations dependent upon the imagination (or storytelling) of the learned. For this reason, Bohr drew an atomic model from his imagination of the Solar System. Today in Quantum Theory we have no orbits but only a ‘probability’ of finding the electron ‘if someone is looking’ as if the rest of the time it lives in the phantoms. Einstein said of Quantum Physics “if it is correct, it signifies the end of physics as a science”, meaning that subatomic particles lack objective existence.
So, if the core of all truth is absolute sublimity, and over that sublimity stands the humungous façade of a law-bounded 3D universe, does the sublime thought not have the right to go for the most plausible theory-of-all-things, the Theory of God! Which can explain that the beginning of the Universe was not an abrupt explosion left to ‘chance’; that new organisms are formed by intricate design, with no ‘waiting time’ and without billions of wasteful and painful mutations; and how the once entangled subatomic particles still communicate when they are billions of miles apart — and why the sublime soul can and does also communicate across distances like that!
Published in The Express Tribune, August 7th, 2020.
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