Inspiration for this entry came from the mid-term elections coming up in the US. It seems that Democrats and Republicans (who currently hold the majority in the House of Representatives) are vying to oppose each other on all issues. Democrats are presenting themselves as pre-evolution (opposing the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools), and pre-environment (imposing taxes on carbon, etc).
One person once told me that the problem between embattled camps of scientific and religious people is that each can’t understand the other’s viewpoint. This is more ture than most people realise.
Religion’s pinciple problem with science is that science is ‘constantly changing it’s mind’. Science, being willing to accept change to it’s founding principles or revoking or fine tuning theorems. This implies that science cannot or will not discover any universal truth. Religion is the search for truth, and truth is truth. It never changes.
But science is not in search of truth, but fact. To paraphrase Indiana Jones:
Science, on the other hand, has trouble understanding why religion is so unwilling to change, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Take the birth of Christ. Historically, we know there were several errors in calculating his date of birth, so he was actually born some time between 4BC and 8 BC. Most religions failed to correct their information.
Take something else, like evolution. Genesis was the the Christian church’s way of explaining how the world and all the animals came into being. But then came geology that proved the age of the Earth was ancient, much older than was widely believed. And then came Darwim who gave us a way to understand how species come into being.
And still the church stuck to genesis.
This is the problem. Science has never claimed to be searching for truth. It is interested in facts. And how we measure, interpret or predict these facts changes over time, so the theories have to change to adapt to this. Newton’s laws of motion are the best example of this. They are correct, so they’re still used. But they are not as accurate as Einstein’s relativity, which gives better predictions of planet positions over time. The problem with Einstein’s calculations are that they’re too complex for everyday use. Newton’s ones are much easier.
Neither gives you a ‘truth.’ They are both theories, that give you formulae to calculate the same problem. You choose which one depending on the accuracy you need.
In fact, the domains of science and religion do not overlap as most people believe. Science is intested in fact, religion in truth. The problem may be that people believe science says truth doesn’t exist. It doesn’t. It just says that science cannot lead you to truth.
If religion wants truth, why does it still believe in things we know to be false. And if science wants truth, why is it always correcting itself?
The problem appears to be the word ‘truth’ itself. Each side is interpreting the word with a different meaning.
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