Are faith and science at an impasse, with faith insisting that it’s view of revelation is the final arbiter of reality, while science refuses to discuss anything that can’t be weighed, measured or tested?
Both faith and science have important contributions to make to our ordinary life. Science makes sense of the natural world, explaining how things work and what the world is made of. This information is used to enhance life, make the world more manageable and extend the reach of our senses. Like any tool, it can also be used to control, and its use can have unexpected consequences.
Faith makes sense of our life experience in the world, explaining why we are here, and our relationship to the world and the people in it. This worldview enhances our life by helping us make sense of our context, our purpose and our future. Like any prescription, it can be divisive and controlling.
Science is an aide to faith because it helps us filter fact from fiction, and provides a means of testing claims that faith makes, especially when it comes to claims about the nature and origin of the world. It also rescues us from a world of caprice and superstition.
Faith can be a useful context for science, suggesting connections and directions for the world and our place in it that are not deducible from strictly material observations.
Faith that is divorced from the real world and how it works slides into superstition and ignorance. Science with no ethical content can become empty materialism. Faith is not the only context for ethics, but it is the source for millions of people.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
enjoyable and well stated!
a couple of quandries:
1) how it is we can productively consider things "not deducible from strictly material observations" (indeed, even scientific hypotheses or theories that need enough "true belief" to develop demonstrated experimental success; and
2) faith sliding into superstition and ignorance happens all too often. Of course, real faith would be of the correct and true "revelation" and then would be tested against the doctrines, these being read in their plain as possible context and interpreted by the overall weight of the doctrines, commentary and experience gleened from overall acceptable (historically accepted orthodoxy) scholarly work ... then of course this has to be in context of on going life in the world, representatively well balanced, taking in science as a matter of course and hopefully somewhat imaginative but helpful way so the least amount of unneccessary disruption and pain ensues from implementing the benefit of the revelation. (attempting some humor w/the comment, he he)
Yeah - I suppose we can really only consider our ideas - but we also seem to be able to distinguish our ideas about the material world from ideas with no counterpart in the material world. One we call reality, the other, fantasy. Reigious ideas fall between the two - no counterpart in the real world, but (we assert) just as real.
As far as how we know we have truth faith - and that we have read the revelation accuratley... in all honesty, while we hold personal conviction, we need to recognize that we could have it wrong - and so stop short of forcing others to believe as we do.
Post a Comment