Science and Religion Argumentative Paper

 

            One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, Albert Einstein said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”  The parallels between science and religion are growing progressively closer together the more knowledge is acquired by scientists and is accepted by theologians.  An important point to remember when comparing and contrasting the two is the idea that truth is homogeneous.  And, with the more recent breakthroughs in the discipline of quantum physics and the discovery of 'the God particle’, the Higgs Boson, God, the Creator Source, is proven to exist by a consistently evolving discovery. 

            “Science employs laws and relationships that describe a mechanistic universe.  Theology defers to the realm of the intentional – God has motives that can be described by agents acting out narratives”  (Levine, 2008).  Contemporary scientists once did not speculate that the earth revolves around the sun, but instead now they understand the earth’s position in the galaxy and why the seasons change as they do.

            Religion is defined as people's beliefs and opinions concerning the existence, nature, and worship of a deity or deities, and divine involvement in the universe and human life.  Various religions differ on many levels but agree on the basic ethical principles such as the Golden Rule of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ or ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’  Religion deals with desire and its intentions.  The scale weighing judgment and mercy is the cause and effect of egoism or altruism, reception and bestowal.  Loving yourself is receiving.  Loving your neighbor is sharing.  Loving your neighbor as yourself is receiving for the sake of sharing.  (Berg, 2006)  That sort of circuity is akin to the mechanics of a light bulb.  When a light bulb becomes bright, it means the filament is present.  A filament in a light bulb represents a resisting of a direct connection of (+) and (-).  A direct connection represents desire for the self alone.  It creates a momentary burst of light followed by darkness.

            In an analogy, we can define God as the attribute of bestowal.  With the sun being the original representative of God, giving life to all earth creatures, it is an accurate comparison, because that was from a time before religion.  The paradigm in mysticism, esoteric knowledge, and a scientific, methodological similarity is between what is proven true about when a light bulb shines or bursts and also how atoms form molecules or disintegrate.  Atoms form molecules by sharing electrons.  Electrons represent the desire to receive.  Mutual reception creates vessels of bestowal.  When receiving is for the sake of sharing, if electrons never disconnect, immortality is achieved.  All atoms are immortal, they just switch molecular compositions, thus creating a basis for scientific research of the afterlife.

            When in the thesis of this paper, I stated that truth is homogeneous, it means that there is absolute truth.  Certainty is achieved through awareness.  It can be called so with observational representationalism, or projections from a branch of philosophy based on “the view that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of the intentional features of experience”  (Gennaro, 2008).  This means that even what cannot be felt by the senses can potentially be validated through individual perceptiveness.  Proof is in witnessing individual actions and states of being affecting the environment, or, as Descarte’s cogito so aptly puts it, “I think, therefore I am.”  Yes, you do exist.  You can tell this to certainly be true, because you are reading this and it creates a reaction.  The God of the Bible told Moses to refer to Him as YHVH, which translates as “I am who I am.”

            So, where does this put religion in society?  Can the myriad of personal convictions be tied back to any verifiable scientific evidence?  Scientists learn about the theory of evolution by natural selection.  Do these two not void any necessary belief about First Cause (God)?  In stark contrast, “according to the creationist view, God produced humans fully formed, with no previous related species.  But what if evolution is God's tool?  Darwin never said anything about God.  Many scientists—and theologians—maintain that it would be perfectly logical to think that a divine being used evolution as a method to create the world”  (Lovgren, 2004). 

            “Being is a type of consciousness writ large of which we have experience and knowledge because we are participants in it”  (Bachyrycz, Launiger, Wilfred, 2004).  We ought to use the shared experience of living to form a epistemological affluence for the purpose of repairing the world.  When mankind aligns definitions between science and religion by merit of the rules of grammar and value ethics, conflict will be rare if not extinct.  The human being will always be however curious.  The process of deciding what is true is a reasonable blueprint by which I, and other people who take claim to certainty, give answers the questions “why”.  The question of how is much more difficult to satisfy.  “If a person believes that if one lives in accord with one's faith that he will be rewarded with eternal life, should he be able to say why?  If a biologist argues that evolution offers the most compelling account of the variety of species on earth, is it also part of that biologist's responsibility to defend that claim, and offer the strongest arguments one can to justify it?”  (Mosser, 2010).

            In conclusion, science and religion observe the same truth, since truth is homogeneous; they see it through different lenses--intellect and emotion.  Beliefs are founded upon emotions.  There are no scientific beliefs, because the word ‘belief’ implies a possibility of doubt.  If science remains theory only, then it is apparently tied to some emotional bias.  When science and religion meet with similar observances, it is called being lucid.  One way to get lucid is through language.  “The philosophy of language investigates the role language plays in human understanding and behavior.  It explores how people are able to communicate with each other, what assumptions must be made to understand adequately that communication, and why there are fundamental difficulties, on occasion, in our understanding each other.  At its most abstract, philosophy of language seeks to show how our understanding of the world is fundamentally connected to the language we use to describe and explain that world, in order to clarify philosophical claims and philosophical puzzles"  (Mosser, 2010).  It is my understanding that God is a verb.  A verb is an action or state of being.  The nouns that this verb, love, describes is matter which exists as dense projections of consciousness.  The God that religion is an ode to and the evidence science seeks as an explanation is the measurement of that symmetrical, conscious movement, one in the same.

References

Bachyrycz, D., Lauinger, B., & Wilfried, V. E. (2004). Hegel's god: A counterfeit double? The Review of Metaphysics, 57(3), 616-617. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/223365597?accountid=32521

Gennaro, R. J.  (2008).  Representationalism, Peripheral Awareness, and the Transparency of Experience.   University of Southern Indiana.  Retrieved from:  http://www.usi.edu/libarts/phil/gennaro/papers/repperiph.pdf

Levine, S.  (2008).  Darwin vs. Dogma: Can Science and Religion be Reconciled?  Yale Scientific.  Retrieved from:  http://www.yalescientific.org/2008/12/darwin-vs-dogma-can-science-and-religion-be-reconciled/

Lovgren, S  (2004).  Evolution and Religion Can Coexist, Scientists Say.  National Geographic News.  Retrieved from:  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1018_041018_science_religion.html

Mosser, K. (2010). A concise introduction to philosophy. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.