Extracts from chapter on "Understanding Religion"

� Copyright 2003 All rights reserved.
Religions have had a major, undeniable, and generally beneficial impact on the development of civilization. At the same time, religious differences have led to repeated bloody struggles in the name of God. Much turmoil can be ascribed to religious disputes. The rise of secularism has therefore convinced many of the educated in the west that religion, and the concept of God, is a dangerous miasma and is neither necessary nor desirable in an enlightened world. This has denied many otherwise thoughtful people a framework for understanding the physical and political world at a level beyond the obvious. It also threatens to deny so-cieties the laudable goal of pursuing ulterior motives to so-cially beneficial ends. In the end, the elimination of religions could lead to social structures based simply on expediency. This potentially dangerous possibility needs to be faced with a fundamental re-examination of the "God Hypothesis."

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The "God Hypothesis"
In our era of triumphant science, a consensus seems to have been reached about how the universe began. Attempts are also being made to provide a quantitative answer to the eschatological question facing the physical sciences: how will our universe end? Both questions are being tackled using scientific theories whose further evolution will surely lead to an even better understanding of the operation and time-line of the physical world. What has not been tackled by science, and is dismissed with a shrug by the world of science and many others, is the question of why the universe began. What initiated the event which resulted in the Big Bang? Moreover, if the end is to be the Big Crunch,  or the Big Chill,  what then?

None of our present or future hard science is likely to explain the antecedents of the universe or the events following its demise. These are non-trivial questions which deal with real issues which are observable in some measure, as for example, in the case of Black Holes. We can detect the existence of Black Holes, but we do not know, nor are we likely to know, what happens to material objects or any intelligence (information) they consume when it falls into the singularity  that Black Holes contain. All matter, intelligence, and information appear to be lost at this singularity. Only the ghostly presence of their gravity remains. At this time it does not seem likely that we can ever develop an understanding of things that are so totally beyond our ability to observe, let alone to understand. To simply say "who cares?" is to submit to ignorance.

Unanswerable questions are not a new dilemma. Ever since the begin-ning of recorded history, even in pre-history if we are to judge by archeo-logical evidence, humans have been undertaking a widespread search for the unknown power behind their experiences. The development of science is in itself one manifestation of this search. Science has explained many issues that puzzled our ancestors, but has made no progress whatsoever in answer-ing the basic question: "What's it all about?"

In a profound sense, science and religion are complementary endeavors. Both are searching for answers to explain the unknown in what we observe. Science looks for answers to "how does it work" while religion seeks to answer "why is it there at all." Both searches proceed using postulates to guide their progress...............

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