AGQ        Why should science and religion clash?            4 October 2008

Yes, why should they?  Both disciplines seek the truth.  It is generally accepted that there are a number of people in religious communities who make no attempt at seeking the truth.  For their own peculiar purposes, they proclaim that certain facts are true without any sensible justification.  The Religious Right (RR) in the USA appear to be one of the groups who just KNOWS that they are right, but are not willing to provide any sensible evidence for their belief.  A number of Muslim groups around the world fall into the same category.

I am of the belief that science will never be able to explain all there is to know about the universe.  Rational Religious folk say that in the end, we have to turn to religion to explain the workings of the universe.  I'm not so certain that the word "explain" is the correct one to use.  It is much more reasonable to say that God produced the Laws of Nature, and we will never understand them all, although the scientific world has got the grip on some of His Laws.

Religious bodies say "you must have faith".  The scientific opponents respond by saying "faith is a nonesense, we need facts.  But scientists also have faith.  They believe that if you show that action A leads to effect B, then you have a Law of Nature.  But no scientist can prove that what has happened a thousand times may not happen on the 1,001th time.  He just has faith that it will, and puts it in his little book as a Law of Nature.

If one looks at the place we inhabit, it is fairly obvious that we are just a speck in the firmament, so to expect us to eventually know how the place works, is simply asking too much.  Even the Laws that we say we understand, we really don't.  We have put into place a mathematical theory that allows us to compute certain actions and predict other actions.  But what does this mean?  It means that the Natural Laws follow a system that we seem to be able to codify.  It has been said the God is a Mathematician.

Science has reached a point where certain activities appear to go against all rational thought.  We are bumping up against the limits of our ability to explain what is going on.  This appears to be the point that we will have to admit failure, and declare that only the Deity will be able to predict certain activities.  Heisenberg has already proposed a limit to our ability to understand Nature.  The Uncertainty Principle is a way of saying that we really do not understand what is happening.

Dear Readers, please pick holes in my argument and let me know what your thoughts are.
CDCNottm@AOL.com