One of the more entertaining aspects of the contemporary mind is it’s proclivity to trip all over itself disclaiming views, half-baked as they may be and frequently are, that may wrankle other contemporary minds. A number of examples appear in this thread, not least of which that science is science and religion is religion and by invoking them in purely those limited, contemporary, postmodern contexts, we can leave them nicely sorted and pigeonholed there.
Surely science, therefore, masters faith. Surely faith is antiquated. This must be obvious.
In other words, the resume of science is unimpeachable. Religion is debunked superstition. Entering the debate requires those disclaimers, lest we not be allowed…to enter the debate.
Which leaves insight, wonder, awe, inquiry, and even open-mindedness, et al, on the sidelines. And surely too love, beauty, principle, justice, and hundreds of other quite real phenomenon, not a one of which is scientifically provable. Philosophically yes; scientifically, no.
So flip this topic over on its other side: In our enlightened, scientific, objectified frame of modern reference, with all its debunking performed and all the quaint old notions its banished, banished, how is it that the spiritual quality of man, as often as not codified and given form in his finest religious enlightenment, has an entire dimension of experience completely outside of the Darwinian standard of our contemporary, scientific day?
In other words, from where comes secular, postmodern, declared, presumed science, painted up as objective, irrefutable objectivity while it’s actually faith-bound and highly idealistic, or it’s various soon-to-be-fact pursuits of hopeful knowledge, they possessing all the properties of faith?
I mean, one day fairly soon, science will alone possess the grand unification of all there is. But that’s neither faith nor is it foolish.
You see, among other things, humans absolutely violate the survival of the fittest rule — we function in the realm of ideas and conscious thought, the physical, scientific universe having somehow developed these decidedly unscientific qualities for reasons only it knows. Plus, humans have an experential quality that contains a entire universe of abstracts utterly useless to the “scientific”, Darwinian trajectory atheists place so much faith in.
Yet, there they are. And they penetrate, well ahead of science, down into the soup of the building blocks of the universe itself. The entire nature of the physical universe, even apart from the great, eternal, problem of its own genesis — one that tears to shreds the false “scientific” constructs of natural versus supernatural — is based on the “faith” that things just are as they are and do as they do.
Penetrate the quantum realm to see this writ large: Below the approximate threshold between Newtonian space and the great mystery of the quantum realm — in other words, when dealing with what this entire construct known as reality is based upon — lies physical self-motivation: Subatomics do what they do simply because they do so! We conjure up Forces to explain what they do, but we leave the question of how they do so functionally ignored.
And this is “scientific”. To the point we’ll trust this vast sea of openendedness, Dawkins-like, to resolve itself, it’s apparent historical proclivity to do nothing whatsoever of the sort notwithstanding.
Because to be faithful to science, we must. Just as we must leave the question of why for the philosophers. So much for grand unification, no?
Imagine: Hard, objective, real, tangible, mystery-solving, answer-bearing (faithful) science knows not a thing about why, and very little, at some very pertinent, physical levels, about how.
Of course, those abstracts will (or should) gnaw at us, even as I have used the common words devised to define them in these simple sentences.
But of course, presumptive, displacing science is not faith. And the sheer faith that science will unfailingly produce An Answer is, of course, somehow also not faith, even though science, by nature, produces as many questions as answers, that being its very nature.
All of this not to bang too much on science — it is as some have observed: The best we have at explaining the physical nature of things. But the experential nature of the human soul, not so much. And the underlying causation and reasons for the existence of All, not at all.
This is no argument for intelligent design. But it’s supremely ironic that science, when used as The Sole Eventual Answer so many faithfully use it as, must then depend so firmly on limiting perspectives and defining parameters. Perhaps it really shouldn’t be used that way. Perhaps we should acknowledge that in reality, science is quite beholden to the faith it clearly resides inside, and that the ability the conscious mind has to grasp realities entirely outside of the sciences proves that they are not masters. They are dependents.
