Tuesday, March 17, 2009

How I Belive in God

I find it amazing that people are basically split into two groups, those that believe in God and those that believe in science. I, for one, believe in both. Here is how:

1. The Bible can not be taken literally. There are many places in which Bible experts explain confusing or seemingly contradictory passages by looking at what these passages mean for the people of the times of the Bible. They use the culture and the language of the era to show what each passage means when taken in context. Now why we must abandon this sort of interpretation (from the standpoint of somebody with a 1AD understanding of science) when it comes to matters of science is beyond my comprehension. Was the world made in seven days? No –that goes against the laws of the universe, God doesn’t need to break his own rules to make earth. Were seven days figurative to represent to cycle of the formation of earth and life? That seems more reasonable. We should not use a book given to us as a work of religion as a text for science. God gave us the ability to perform experiments, to think the results that we get from science are there to intentionally mislead us is tomfoolery.

2. Miracles are in the timing. For some reason when "miracles" are explained by natural phenomenon this ruffles some feathers of the devout. I think that we need to stop thinking about miracles as the action but instead as the timing. I find the idea of God needing miracles to direct human history as a bit degrading to his power. Think about it -there are thousands of parameters that need to be set to make the whole universe contain matter that doesn't just degenerate into a soup of energy waves, yet we are to believe that he didn't plan ahead enough to part the Red Sea at the right time? God has already set into motion every miracle that will happen, and they will play out through provable science techniques. Saying that God has to change the rules of the universe just because of actions of people is mighty arrogant of our part. The miracle not that the Red Sea was parted, the miracle is that it parted when it did.

3. Science only leads to more questions. When it comes to the nature of the universe science is very good at opening doors but very terrible at closing them. Instead of four elements (earth, fire, wind, air) we now have 117 elements, which can be broken down into subatomic particles which have anti-particles, which are possibly all made up of infinity thin quantum strings which adhere to quantum mechanics that dictate that every possible outcome does actually happen. ...Right... Currently science is saying we have no idea how the basic building blocks of the universe work. Even when we figure out a unified theory of everything it will just lead to a pile of new questions that need to be answered, which in turn will lead to even more questions. I don't understand why learning about the universe that God placed us in is somehow a violation of God. I trust that if there is something that he does not want us to know about he would have the ability to hide it from us. Heck, there might be all the puppet masters in a parallel universe pulling their strings into this one, and we have no way to detect it. This point is that for me science does not make God worthless, instead it shows us how much there actually is to all of this, it makes God all the more needed to make the ends meet. There are true answers to the questions- however the more we learn about our surroundings the less we “know” the answers.

4. God can not be proven/disproven. It seems to be quite obvious that God can not be proven or disproven by science. And to think that we can do so is akin to thinking that we can prove that there is a city named Boston by measuring the temperature that water boils at. The nature of science is so far away from being able to disprove God that to think that we could through experiment is vastly overestimating our abilities as humans, and quite arrogant.

You will see that I have shied away from the topics of why I should believe in God and all the stuff like that that normal discussion of God turns to. That is really quite another subject, and one of even more faith. The bottom line of this post is just to point out that science and God can co-exist, much like a car and a driver. Figuring out how the car works has no relation as to why it does.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree! r in gc

Irene said...

Excellent post. Very good points and it makes perfect sense. I always believed in god, but I never took every word in the bible literally. Just think of the simple saying' In my day....' Am I talking about one day of my life? no I'm referring to a time period of my youth. reference to the creation of the earth, one day could be 1 day, or could be a million years. plus the bible was written in latin, a dead language because it does not have enough words to describe things. No wonder so many things can be interpreted differently by different religions using the exact same bible. I highly doubt any religion is right about every meaning. Having religion is called faith for a reason. To have faith is to believe something even if you dont have direct proof. It is fine for science to look for reasons, but I agree with you. that does no explanation for something happening can prove there is no god. Good post!

The Gare Bear said...

Every time science asks a question, God gets bigger. Am I glad I am a scientist who believes in God? Yes. Is the world a better place because I believe in God? I hope so.

The Math Ninja said...

uh mom, the Bible wasn't originally written in Latin...and without looking it up, I'm not sure what it was written in...

Okay I looked it up, it was Hebrew.

Willie Baronet said...

What about those of us who have no idea?

Daily said...

i'm down with your thoughts on this subject and i agree. there is enough room for whatever there is "out" there. i think the churches got entirely too controlling in individual families, they were given too much power.

humans are fallible, i think this whole sinning thing caused more harm than good, people felt like crap b/c they were unable to be perfect.

and don't get me started on the not believing in birth control and the women that died b/c of this.