Dustin Arand's Blog - Posts Tagged "philosophy-religion"
In Search of a Galactic Gospel
“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Earlier this year in a piece published in National Geographic, Francis Collins – the geneticist behind the Human Genome Project and the director of the National Institutes of Health – explained why he is a Christian, and why he feels science and faith are compatible.
“At the most fundamental level, it’s a miracle that there’s a universe at all. It’s a miracle that it has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of complexity, and laws that follow precise mathematical formulas.”
No beef with that assessment, but I don’t see how it gets you to Christianity. He says faith can be a better path than science when it comes to answering questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here?” But what kind of faith can he have in mind?
Back when I was reading the Bible, one thing that occurred to me was the difficulty of claiming a special place for a particular religious tradition. Say you claim the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That would make your religion special, but it would also make it absurd, as even most Christians today recognize that the Bible, if taken literally, is full of contradictions, factual inaccuracies, and beastly morality. But then if you say the Bible conveys “truths” through allegory and metaphor, I could just as easily respond that so do the holy books of every other religion, and many secular works of philosophy and literature as well.
Which makes me wonder, if we tried to take the common denominator of all human religions, what would we find? Would we even find anything, or are religions like Wittgenstein’s games, sharing many family resemblances but no common essence?
Even if we could find an essence of human religion, what if we took the inquiry to the cosmic level? Imagine a race of intelligent aliens who, having survived their technological adolescence, have moved on to colonize the galaxy over a span of billions of years. Would they have religion? If so, what, if anything, would it have in common with ours?
Look again at the quote by James. The laws of physics, of the chemical bond, of heredity and selection, are not seen, but only inferred. Theories do not map onto reality so much as they help us organize our thoughts and perceptions, so that we might bring our behavior into better alignment with the way the world is. Viewed this way, perhaps science, by eschewing absolute truths in favor of endless wonder at the world around us, is more religious than religion, at least in this most general, cosmic sense.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Earlier this year in a piece published in National Geographic, Francis Collins – the geneticist behind the Human Genome Project and the director of the National Institutes of Health – explained why he is a Christian, and why he feels science and faith are compatible.
“At the most fundamental level, it’s a miracle that there’s a universe at all. It’s a miracle that it has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of complexity, and laws that follow precise mathematical formulas.”
No beef with that assessment, but I don’t see how it gets you to Christianity. He says faith can be a better path than science when it comes to answering questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here?” But what kind of faith can he have in mind?
Back when I was reading the Bible, one thing that occurred to me was the difficulty of claiming a special place for a particular religious tradition. Say you claim the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That would make your religion special, but it would also make it absurd, as even most Christians today recognize that the Bible, if taken literally, is full of contradictions, factual inaccuracies, and beastly morality. But then if you say the Bible conveys “truths” through allegory and metaphor, I could just as easily respond that so do the holy books of every other religion, and many secular works of philosophy and literature as well.
Which makes me wonder, if we tried to take the common denominator of all human religions, what would we find? Would we even find anything, or are religions like Wittgenstein’s games, sharing many family resemblances but no common essence?
Even if we could find an essence of human religion, what if we took the inquiry to the cosmic level? Imagine a race of intelligent aliens who, having survived their technological adolescence, have moved on to colonize the galaxy over a span of billions of years. Would they have religion? If so, what, if anything, would it have in common with ours?
Look again at the quote by James. The laws of physics, of the chemical bond, of heredity and selection, are not seen, but only inferred. Theories do not map onto reality so much as they help us organize our thoughts and perceptions, so that we might bring our behavior into better alignment with the way the world is. Viewed this way, perhaps science, by eschewing absolute truths in favor of endless wonder at the world around us, is more religious than religion, at least in this most general, cosmic sense.
