Over the last few years, as I have participated in both religious and scientific communities, I have detected a certain degree of hostility arising from conflicting views of science and religion. This conflict betwixt points of view has traversed through the carotid arteries of every human being that has taken either religion or science into consideration and has created an ever widening rift between the two communities. On almost every front of the human imagination, dogmatic scriptures and blind scientific advancement threaten to cause a cataclysmic collapse of the mentality of man and hinder the coming of the next steps of human advancement, as a species.
The very ingredients that allowed man to ascend from the framework of the biological super-systems that have consumed this planet and have come to be this planet can be organized into two equally important fields of the property of humanity that we have come to call �sentience� or �self-awareness�.
The first field that has predominantly taken hold over the psyche of society, as a whole, has manifested itself into forms such as religion and, more generally, belief. Religion and belief have their origins in man�s so far futile attempt to explain the purpose of our existence and the existence of our world, and their relation to one another. However futile, it does have value in its presence. Our very existence implies a source or purpose. Or else why would we exist? The fact that I may ask that question implies inherent purpose to our existence and if not, implies purpose to the lack of purpose to our existence, which would thus lead, though indirectly, to a purpose of our existence, but Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest answer is the most likely valid one. Our existence is a means to some end, whether intelligently engineered or chaotically assembled. The realization that this causality exists is all that is really required. This realization is the necessary foundation of all belief. All ensuing details about a person�s beliefs are simply speculation. If there isn�t intelligent design, then the intentions of the universe are as unattainable as the information swallowed by a singularity, and if there is only God knows specifically what His plans are. Thus, the beliefs of a person are entirely up to that person and only to that person. Both a priest and a peon understand the plans of the universe equally well, even if it is not at all. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine. It combines experience, innate behavior and memory into a perception of reality. This combination provides us with a basic pattern of the way our world works by which we follow in order to make decisions in the future. Because experience varies, belief varies. It is thus that it ought to be expected that each person�s beliefs about the world in which they are immersed differ from person to person.
The second field of the human mind that played the dominant role in the assertion of man's earthly dominance, from the jungles of Africa and the agricultural valleys of Mesopotamia is logical reasoning. Up until the last couple hundred of years, reason worked largely in conjunction with belief. The Egyptians used advanced mathematics to erect the pyramids to house the bodies of pharaohs for the after-life. The Mayans and Aztecs had very similar traditions. Through the Dark Ages education in Europe was maintained almost entirely by the Roman Catholic Church. Of all people, Isaac Newton was a devout Christian and Albert Einstein was no less a follower of Judaism. Isaac Newton once said, �I am not questioning the clockmaker, I am only explaining the clock.� Science is mankind�s more direct connection to the world around us. From birth, we are given all the tools necessary to understand the world around us to some degree, if not all of it, from a logical standpoint. The development of the human brain is as dynamic as it is ingenious by design (though, not necessarily godly design). As it absorbs new information, the system itself changes to adjust to its surroundings. The human mind is a dynamic interface that combines innate logic scaffolding to structural and systematic experience. This combination fabricates an ever-changing perception of the world around us linked to a vague realization of possible future outcomes. This definite mental connection between two points in time or space is the groundwork of logic. It is through this interesting connection between two occurrences or objects that we reveal indirectly evident truths about our universe. Reality really boils down to one thing: what signals arrive at our cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is the home of all things that differentiate us humans from all other species, as well as from eachother. Certain parts of our brain may tell us to stubbornly believe something while other parts of our brain may indicate that what we originally thought was so, isn�t actually so. But the important thing is that there is one and only one reality to which each human mind corresponds. In a perfect world, religion and science shouldn�t conflict, since they both should be describing the same world.
The Connection between Purpose and Existence
Much of the conflict that occurs between religion and science comes from a major confusion of the meaning of the question word, 'Why'. The overall, underlying, and all encompassing goal of science is to explain and predict the structure and behavior of the world around us. This drive to fulfill this quest comes from man's incessant urge to wake and one day and be able to comprehend how every thing around them functions. However, that is the territory of 'how'. The reason that mankind builds submarines, space shuttles and particle accelerators is because that urge of omnivolent curiousity exists. 'Why' is the inquiry of reason for the existence of something or some process. The answer to 'why' gives the reason for 'how'. When it comes down to it, the conflict between religion and science is simply a misinterpretation of 'why'. Scientific acheivement is the pursuit of the answer to 'how', whereas religion is the assumed understanding of the answer to 'why'. But sometimes scientists, and religious zealots can confuse those two words. On the science side, scientists can sometimes assume that, because they have the means to carry out an action or process, they may as they will. They forget to find a suitable answer to 'why'. They occasionally conduct actions that have no foreseeable purposes; no justification. On the religious side, religious people assume that, because their faith assumes a certain purpose to be true, a certain process that may or may not have actually been reality is, in fact, true. They assume that because they see personal reason and fulfillment in an existence of object or process, there must be in turn a corresponding 'how' that drives it into existence.
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