Check out this long-winded philosophical meandering journey to all places except the question it purports to ask: Nothingness (Why is there something rather than nothing?) I’m blown away at the ability of scientists and philosophers to finagle their way around the question. All your philosophical and scientific sounding rabbit holes are transparent – they do nothing to dissuade the honesty of the original question. We, as citizens of mankind, owe it to ourselves to tackle this question head on.
Tag: reason
This is not Religion versus Science
My recent and, likely, typical posts on this blog have obviously been with a bias toward Christianity. As to this blatant bias I hold no shame. The requirement I hold up for myself is truth. Bias may sway to one end or another, but bias is altogether a wholly different thing than truth, and the man who holds a bias and yet holds truth, that man is to be envied. I may not be that man but that is my goal.
My recent and, likely, typical posts on this blog have obviously been with a bias toward Christianity. As to this blatant bias I hold no shame. The requirement I hold up for myself is truth. Bias may sway to one end or another, but bias is altogether a wholly different thing than truth, and the man who holds a bias and yet holds truth, that man is to be envied. I may not be that man but that is my goal.
As to the bent of writing, the astute mind will immediately recognize that these things we speak on are not about sides. There is no us and them. There is no religion/faith/belief on one side and science/reason/logic on another. The intelligent individual will realize that the Christian is not anti-science, as I have been labeled in the past and will certainly be labeled in the future. Christianity is not anti-science. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That truth is this: The Christian has learned that, as Chesterton put it, God is a truth teller and we have learned to give him the benefit of the doubt. As we grow in the faith we see that God tells us the truth of things. Not because he says so and that’s that, but because he says so and, behold, we find it out to have been true. This benefit of the doubt is key. We give God the benefit of the doubt. We see His Word say one thing and creation tell us another. Yet time and again, given time, we see that He was right all along and it just took some time for modern research to see it.
I will take one example. In the story of Jonah and his preaching to Ninevah, the Bible makes the city sound great. In the past hundred years scholars have said it couldn’t possibly have been very big at all. Yet archaeologists come along and find the foundations of that city and see that it was easily as big as written about. This is just one example and there are more, some larger and some smaller.
This, though, is the crux of the resistance of Christianity to modern thought that contradicts what we know the bible to say. We know the track record of the bible is to come out right in the end. Therefore we resist. We do not resist beyond all reason, though. Prove something, such as the earth orbiting around the sun, and it will be considered and we will understand our own misunderstanding of the bible and we will correct ourselves.
Christianity has, time and again, resisted and then accepted new ideas but there are some ideas which, no matter how much time passes, can not be proven and can not be accepted. I write on a number of these, including creation and evolution, origins, and more. It is critical to understand than when an idea is resisted and then later accepted it is not because it still contradicts the bible yet we accept it because it is the “truth.” In actuality, we realize our own misunderstanding of what the bible was saying and come to see the truth in light of another truth. This has not occurred with evolution, however. We do not yet see that evolution is proven nor that there is any possibility of the scriptures writing it and we simply lacked the understanding before. We also do not foresee this changing. Evolution is not proven and, as much as we look, the scriptures do not speak to it. In fact, the scriptures speak to the opposite of it. That is why it is resisted.
I hope it is clear to all that religion and science are not adverse. Science has its tools of proof. So too does religion. Each requires that a thing pass the test before it is accepted as truth. We must all hold up rationality instead of dogmas. We must all bridge divides instead of creating them. Any given side can be accused of these things.
The Unreasonable Doubt of Rational Deduction
Because science relies only on what we know to reliably reveal the truth, we call this objective inquiry or rational thought. But this is only rational if you’re blissfully innocent of all senses to the contrary of the result. In actuality, science, as the penultimate source of truth, is the abandonment of reason.
Science employs the five natural senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, or technological extensions or assistances of these, in order to understand the existence in which we reside. Because science relies only on what we know to reliably reveal the truth, we call this objective inquiry or rational thought. But this is only rational if you’re blissfully innocent of all senses to the contrary of the result. In actuality, science, as the penultimate source of truth, is the abandonment of reason.
By objectifying the senses, taking them out of the subjective, the man, we lose the qualities of the mind, which not only processes the data from the five senses, but also applies another sense to the compilation of all those data streams. It applies rational deduction.
Rational deduction is not simply an analysis of the five senses and a summary report, or we would find it difficult to call it the sense we instinctively know it to be. A sense it is, we gather, and it often tells us things contrary to what our individual senses would have us to believe.
We find we have an additional sense which can not be separated from the man. In separating the senses which can be separated from the man and ignoring what can not, science, well-meaning and profitable in cases it may be, has seen fit to conclude on a matter missing the most integral sense of them all. Science has seen it reasonable to objectify the senses that it can objectify while leaving out what it can not. This it has not deemed unreasonable though the mind enables the most critical sense of them all, the rational sense.
In other words, the only thing that gives a man reason is his mind. Science has taken the mind out of the picture and has thus become unreasonable.
It should be clear that a complete, coherent perception of the existence which you inhabit requires not a simple, black and white analysis of the natural, but a complex arsenal of rational tools. Science has naively over-simplified its toolset and become irrational.
Well stated by one of the most prominent men of science, Einstein, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”