The "science" of "religion"
One of the craziest things in the world today is the complete lack of respect and regard that science and religion have for each other. They seem to oppose each other as a matter of principle these days. Neither is willing to admit that the other may have some small validity. Religious folks go so far as to say that scientists actively try and disprove the existence of god while scientists present evidence that religious feelings are nothing more than a chemically induced reaction in the brain. Both views are a bit out of whack...out of balance...and after an extended debate about this question with a friend, I’m now going to probably offend both sides of the dividing line between science and religion.
You see...both sides make a very valid case for themselves. At least insofar as they explain the existence of life, at least. I’m not even going to touch on the question of morality and ethics and “the truth about Christ” or whatever the case might be. I’m going to focus on life rather than living.
Science tells us that life evolved, and the evidence they present for this is very strong. You have many, many scientifically sound methods that support the theory of evolution. But there are a few small snags with the theory. One of them is the origin of life. To this day, science cannot explain it. When you look at a cell, it’s just a collection of chemicals, proteins and lipids that interact with each other in such a way that they form a single unit that interacts with its environment. What exactly holds it all together is still a mystery. Scientifically speaking, there’s no difference between a living cell and a dead one except that in a dead one, the cohesive force that drove all the processes are no longer there. Exactly what this force is is a mystery. A dead cell is still chemically active, but it is no longer coordinated.
Scientists have also never managed to create life spontaneously in the lab. Even if you put all the cell constituents together in a container, they won’t spontaneously form a living cell. And that is a major problem with the theory of evolution. We can follow the course of evolution almost all the way from the first cell in the primordial soup all the way to the enormous biological diversity we see today. The progression from single-celled archaeobacteria to modern bacteria, to eucaryotes to multicellular to actual animals with specialised systems areall there in the fossil record...but the defining moment...the essential HOW of life...HOW it arose to start with so it could proceed down the evolutionary path is still a mystery.
Another problem with the theory is that life seems to go counter to one of the major laws of thermodynamics: the law of entropy. It tells us that complex systems will decline to simpler forms over time. Evolution goes completely counter to this. Life arose seemingly spontaneously from a simple chemical soup...and scientists have calculated that while this COULD happen in theory, it would require 500 billion years...and the earth is only 4.5 billion years old. Ouch.
The really amazing thing about life is that spontaneity seems to be a feature of it. Take a look at proteins. They’re just a collection of amino acids all joined together, just like DNA is nothing more than a collection nucleobases. There are 21 amino acids and 4 nucleobases...and yet in combination, they produce the most amazingly coherent, functional structures. The amino acids and nucleobases can be easily synthesised in the lab...but even the simplest of proteins cannot be, even though the protein is nothing more than a string of amino acids. Inside of a living cell, the proteins will SPONTANIOUSLY fold itself into its functional shape. In a lab environment...it simply doesn’t happen. Science cannot explain why not. Even with the contents of broken cells added to the artificially created proteins, they will not fold.
There’s always some little point where science cannot go, and that holds true in physics and mathematics as well. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that there are limits to what we can know about the physical world, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems place limits on what we can know mathematically. So it’s clear that science can never give us all the answers. Why should biology be any different?
Religious folks...don’t start laughing yet though. Science may not be able to give us all the answers, but that doesn’t mean you’re right and everything science DOES tell us is wrong. Science CAN tell us a lot about the universe and it’s been FAR more successful in explaining the universe than religion ever was. Within the limits of what science can tell us, there’s a great realm of truth. Make no mistake, religious folks. Things like evolution DO happen, and the earth really IS over 4 billion years old. All this really means is that we need to look outside of science for the answers to certain questions, and I think this is where religion can be helpful.
Well...maybe not strictly speaking ‘religion’, but certainly spirituality. I do think that there should be balance between the things we know from science and the things we believe, or deduce, at the spiritual level.
I think that “life”, that cohesive force that makes a lipid-bag full of organic substances behave in a coherent way, that makes proteins fold spontaneously, is another physical force...an integral part of the universe in the same way that gravity is. Science of course will never admit to such a possibility. It would smack of mysticism instead of rationality...
Ask yourself seriously though...why not? Why could such a force not exist? Why could it not follow a set of laws like gravity does? Mystics have been saying for millennia that such a force exists, although explanations for it differ. Wiccans and Taoists believe that it’s a natural force that has its origins with the “creative power of the universe”, aka Akasha. Native Americans call it “Wakan-Taka”, the Great Spirit. Practitioners of magick know how to use this force and have developed ways of using it. Could this force be the same force that “powers” life?
Think about it: in the universe, there’s duality in everything...a counter-balancing force that keeps everything from disintegrating. In order to produce complex systems, you must balance certain physical forces against each other. Look at celestial mechanics. You have the force of gravity countered by the energy of motion to produce star-systems. In a star, gravity is countered by thermonuclear forces to keep the star from collapsing in on itself. You have force-equivalences implicit in many equations: F=ma (force equals mass times acceleration) or even E=mc2 (the energy in any given mass is equal to that mass times the square of the speed of light). The whole universe is composed of a whole lot of forces that are equivalent to each other, balancing each other. So it stands to reason that there could be some kind of force out there to counter-balance entropy with, right? A force that complicates instead of simplifies, something that strives toward perfection and change rather than reduction and stasis. Again...mystics have been saying this for years.
When you look at it in a certain way...such a force would explain a lot. Most religions accept that people have souls...something that lives on after death. That would stand to reason since such a thing - a soul - could explain why death occurs, why the cells in the body suddenly lose their “cohesiveness”. It could be the soul that’s making the body “live”. And because this “soul” is a complexing force, it drives the body to change, grow, evolve. The same thing could be happening to the soul, you see. Little bits of the “creative force of the universe” could invade chemical bodies, and assume more complex bodies as the spirit matures. That could be what drives evolution. That could explain all kinds of spiritual things as well: spirits of all kinds, the speculative existence of gods, which would then simply be spirits (or bits of the creative power that had become individualised through its individual experience in its various bodies) that had evolved into higher forms, just like biological beings have evolved into more complex beings in response to their spiritual development.
No. There’s no proof of the correctness of this bit of speculation, and I’m sure that pagans and Christians and even other scientists would be mortally offended by this...but you know what? Blow me! It’s just speculation and in MY mind, it would make FAR more sense that either creationism or evolution could on their own. It draws a lot of things together and makes sense of all of it, and I like that.
No. I don’t necessarily believe in this myself. It’s just some idle speculation to while away a bit of time.
So there. :P
You see...both sides make a very valid case for themselves. At least insofar as they explain the existence of life, at least. I’m not even going to touch on the question of morality and ethics and “the truth about Christ” or whatever the case might be. I’m going to focus on life rather than living.
Science tells us that life evolved, and the evidence they present for this is very strong. You have many, many scientifically sound methods that support the theory of evolution. But there are a few small snags with the theory. One of them is the origin of life. To this day, science cannot explain it. When you look at a cell, it’s just a collection of chemicals, proteins and lipids that interact with each other in such a way that they form a single unit that interacts with its environment. What exactly holds it all together is still a mystery. Scientifically speaking, there’s no difference between a living cell and a dead one except that in a dead one, the cohesive force that drove all the processes are no longer there. Exactly what this force is is a mystery. A dead cell is still chemically active, but it is no longer coordinated.
Scientists have also never managed to create life spontaneously in the lab. Even if you put all the cell constituents together in a container, they won’t spontaneously form a living cell. And that is a major problem with the theory of evolution. We can follow the course of evolution almost all the way from the first cell in the primordial soup all the way to the enormous biological diversity we see today. The progression from single-celled archaeobacteria to modern bacteria, to eucaryotes to multicellular to actual animals with specialised systems areall there in the fossil record...but the defining moment...the essential HOW of life...HOW it arose to start with so it could proceed down the evolutionary path is still a mystery.
Another problem with the theory is that life seems to go counter to one of the major laws of thermodynamics: the law of entropy. It tells us that complex systems will decline to simpler forms over time. Evolution goes completely counter to this. Life arose seemingly spontaneously from a simple chemical soup...and scientists have calculated that while this COULD happen in theory, it would require 500 billion years...and the earth is only 4.5 billion years old. Ouch.
The really amazing thing about life is that spontaneity seems to be a feature of it. Take a look at proteins. They’re just a collection of amino acids all joined together, just like DNA is nothing more than a collection nucleobases. There are 21 amino acids and 4 nucleobases...and yet in combination, they produce the most amazingly coherent, functional structures. The amino acids and nucleobases can be easily synthesised in the lab...but even the simplest of proteins cannot be, even though the protein is nothing more than a string of amino acids. Inside of a living cell, the proteins will SPONTANIOUSLY fold itself into its functional shape. In a lab environment...it simply doesn’t happen. Science cannot explain why not. Even with the contents of broken cells added to the artificially created proteins, they will not fold.
There’s always some little point where science cannot go, and that holds true in physics and mathematics as well. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that there are limits to what we can know about the physical world, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems place limits on what we can know mathematically. So it’s clear that science can never give us all the answers. Why should biology be any different?
Religious folks...don’t start laughing yet though. Science may not be able to give us all the answers, but that doesn’t mean you’re right and everything science DOES tell us is wrong. Science CAN tell us a lot about the universe and it’s been FAR more successful in explaining the universe than religion ever was. Within the limits of what science can tell us, there’s a great realm of truth. Make no mistake, religious folks. Things like evolution DO happen, and the earth really IS over 4 billion years old. All this really means is that we need to look outside of science for the answers to certain questions, and I think this is where religion can be helpful.
Well...maybe not strictly speaking ‘religion’, but certainly spirituality. I do think that there should be balance between the things we know from science and the things we believe, or deduce, at the spiritual level.
I think that “life”, that cohesive force that makes a lipid-bag full of organic substances behave in a coherent way, that makes proteins fold spontaneously, is another physical force...an integral part of the universe in the same way that gravity is. Science of course will never admit to such a possibility. It would smack of mysticism instead of rationality...
Ask yourself seriously though...why not? Why could such a force not exist? Why could it not follow a set of laws like gravity does? Mystics have been saying for millennia that such a force exists, although explanations for it differ. Wiccans and Taoists believe that it’s a natural force that has its origins with the “creative power of the universe”, aka Akasha. Native Americans call it “Wakan-Taka”, the Great Spirit. Practitioners of magick know how to use this force and have developed ways of using it. Could this force be the same force that “powers” life?
Think about it: in the universe, there’s duality in everything...a counter-balancing force that keeps everything from disintegrating. In order to produce complex systems, you must balance certain physical forces against each other. Look at celestial mechanics. You have the force of gravity countered by the energy of motion to produce star-systems. In a star, gravity is countered by thermonuclear forces to keep the star from collapsing in on itself. You have force-equivalences implicit in many equations: F=ma (force equals mass times acceleration) or even E=mc2 (the energy in any given mass is equal to that mass times the square of the speed of light). The whole universe is composed of a whole lot of forces that are equivalent to each other, balancing each other. So it stands to reason that there could be some kind of force out there to counter-balance entropy with, right? A force that complicates instead of simplifies, something that strives toward perfection and change rather than reduction and stasis. Again...mystics have been saying this for years.
When you look at it in a certain way...such a force would explain a lot. Most religions accept that people have souls...something that lives on after death. That would stand to reason since such a thing - a soul - could explain why death occurs, why the cells in the body suddenly lose their “cohesiveness”. It could be the soul that’s making the body “live”. And because this “soul” is a complexing force, it drives the body to change, grow, evolve. The same thing could be happening to the soul, you see. Little bits of the “creative force of the universe” could invade chemical bodies, and assume more complex bodies as the spirit matures. That could be what drives evolution. That could explain all kinds of spiritual things as well: spirits of all kinds, the speculative existence of gods, which would then simply be spirits (or bits of the creative power that had become individualised through its individual experience in its various bodies) that had evolved into higher forms, just like biological beings have evolved into more complex beings in response to their spiritual development.
No. There’s no proof of the correctness of this bit of speculation, and I’m sure that pagans and Christians and even other scientists would be mortally offended by this...but you know what? Blow me! It’s just speculation and in MY mind, it would make FAR more sense that either creationism or evolution could on their own. It draws a lot of things together and makes sense of all of it, and I like that.
No. I don’t necessarily believe in this myself. It’s just some idle speculation to while away a bit of time.
So there. :P