Note - I revised the original post to clarify things.The first rule of political campaigns is: not everyone thinks as you do. The same could be said for religion, which is why it's good practice not to discuss either subject in polite company.
Yorkshire Pudding had a
recent post that provoked some thinking on my part. The post describes his visit to Lourdes, which for the uninformed, is a shrine in the Catholic religion. His experience at Lourdes was quite different than mine would have been. That's some speculation on my part, because I've never been to Lourdes. But I think we would approach the place from different perspectives.
My theory goes something like this: ever since human beings have been able to wonder about their surroundings, they have been trying to find God, or more precisely, they have been trying to become God. Take a look at the night sky - you can't help but be awed by the sight. Our ancestors had their own ideas about what those little twinkling lights were all about. It's only been in the last three or four hundred years that we have come to realize what the stars really are, and that the earth is not the center of the universe.
But how did we obtain that knowledge? The answer is science. Through a method of testing various hypotheses, we can eliminate some possibilities, and ultimately, we arrive at what we believe to be the truth. And our desire to learn what makes things tick is what compelled us to travel to the moon and beyond. We want to know how it all began, we want to know how life emerged on this planet, and we want to know if life exists elsewhere. By "we," I mean humankind. There are plenty of people on this earth who could not care less about these things, but it is the yearning for knowledge -- complete knowledge -- that propels the human race forward.
I'm using space exploration and cosmology as examples here, but you could replace them with any other human endeavor and arrive at the same conclusion. We want to know everything there is to know about everything. Think of the human genome, the pursuit of a cancer cure, and the attempts to find the
Grand Unified Theory. Once you have achieved full knowledge of everything, you have become God because you no longer need a higher power to provide the answers.
Marx called religion the opiate of the masses, and more than one war has been fought on religious grounds. To see how badly things can turn out, look no further than September 11. It's hard to disagree with those who say that religion has caused many sufferings, but it's vital to understand the context of the blame. It is most likely the practitioner of religion, not the religion itself, that is to blame. Different cultures have different views of God, not all of which can be true. And adhering to a religion is not the same as accepting all aspects of that religion, let alone accepting the premise of an unmoved mover.
We continue our pursuit of perfection and full knowledge, even while we have no way of knowing how it all began. The Big Bang Theory is generally accepted in the scientific community, but there is no way to know, given our current state of technology, if it actually happened. Even if it did, its very existence would beg the question: what was there before the Big Bang? We're told it was a singularity, which is just a nice way of saying, "Who the hell knows?" Cynics might ask what God was doing before the Big Bang. The answer: he was creating hell for people who ask questions like that.
Back in a college philosophy class, I ran across a passage that really amused me. But as I thought further about it, my amusement turned into resignation. Science can't answer everything. As so cleverly put by Robert Jastrow in
God and the Astronomers:
For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.And that is the end of the story.
