Reconsidering Religion and Science

The resent debate between Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum, has fueled the unnecessary conflict between science and religion.  Ultimately, science and religion present two different means of knowing that make different assumptions about reality.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan

Consider this analogy:  T’ai Chi Ch’uan (T’ai chi) and Krava Maga are two different martial arts.  These disciplines have the common goal of self-defense. 

However, both styles make different assumptions about how one should defend themselves. 

For example, T’ai Chi Ch’uan encourages students to redirect an attackers strength against their opponent and is a passive, yet effective, fighting style.  Krav Maga encourages students to end a fight as quickly as possible by attacking vulnerable body parts and is an aggressive and efficient style.

Krav Maga

Both martial arts have pros and cons. While one may be better suited in a particular context over the other, it would be unreasonable to say that one is inherently better than the other.  They have similar goals but make different assumptions about how to achieve these goals.

Likewise, both religion and science represent different processes in the distillation of knowledge. While they are not completely incompatible, it is unnecessary to pit them against each other.  They make different etymological and cosmological assumptions. These assumptions are not based on Truth, but are necessary for any progress to be made.

To illustrate, science requires the assumption of a measurable and material universe with consistent laws. This is a lofty assumption and is often rejected by theoretical and quantum physicists, among other scholars.  Science can only study what is empirically falsifiable.  Science can make no statement for or against the transcendent or the divine which do not exist materially.

On the contrary, most religions operate on the assumption that humans can somehow know and interact with a transcendent principle of reality.  Both science and religion adequately describe the world around but make different assumptions.  To say that one is inherently better than the other is to say that T’ai Chi Ch’uan is better than Krav Maga.

Fuck quantum mystics; protect the status quo!?

Einstein

If we think of the field as being removed, there is no ’space’ which remains, since space does not have an independent existence.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Hence it is clear that the space of physics is not, in the last analysis, anything given in nature or independent of human thought. It is a function of our conceptual scheme.

One has to find the possibility to avoid the continuum (together with space and time) altogether. But I have not the slightest idea what kind of elementary concepts could be used in such a theory.

Eugene Wigner

It will remain remarkable, in what ever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.

Max Plank

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part the mystery we are trying to solve.

Niel Bohr

The common sense view of the world in terms of object that really exist “put there” independently of our observations, totally collapses in the face of the quantum factor.