To Every Thing There Is A Purpose Under Heaven

Faith is a firm belief in the occurrence of the improbable, the evidence of things unseen, the substance of hope.

Faith is the undoubting sense that the sun will rise at dawn, the stars will come out at night, oceans will ebb and flow, that God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

Faith has been the bedrock of every religion, great and small, over the millennia of humankind’s shaky existence on this round rock we call home. When storms lashed, lightning flashed, earthquakes rumbled, tornadoes twisted, crops failed and nature prevailed, religious faith provided the courage and will to continue down the long, twisted, perilous path to the present.

During that journey, our curiosity focused on the details and cycles of natural events. We began to look out at the world, to explore and discover. We gradually came to rely less on unquestioning faith in unseen forces and more on the observed facts and tested theories of science to explain the phenomena of nature.

Science begins in faith that we can know about what we see on Earth and in the heavens. It is the quest to render probable what seems on the surface to be improbable. Science seeks to see the unseen and reduce it to a set of principles, to provide an explanation, to acquire knowledge. It is the pursuit of knowing about the world in which we live.

Science uses defined procedures in the systematic pursuit of this knowledge - procedures that include observation, experimentation and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. These procedures are applied over and over and over again until a clarity emerges from mystery, ignorance and misunderstanding.

Through the methods of science, we’ve discovered Earth is not the center of universe, nor is it flat. Lightning bolts are not thrown by vengeful gods. Life is neither a sudden nor recent production. Science transformed the myths masking the natural world into theories outlining how the universe really works. Many of these theories manifested into tools, technologies and social structures.

Judeo-Christian proponents of creationism claim their faith has now evolved into a science and want their side of the argument presented alongside the science of evolution in the classroom. In a seeming reversal of the alchemist of old, they would turn golden faith into the gray metal of science and reduce their vision to the rhetoric of the very science they dispute.

They want the creator of the universe to be a scientist. That presents problems for both faith and science.

There is another problem involved in the placement of the Judeo-Christian creation myth in a position equal to the scientific theory of the beginning: It is not the sole possession of any one religion.

To be fair, the creation myths of all our religions, past and present, East and West, should be given a chance to be clothed in science and represented. The ancient mythologies of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Druids, Norse, Buddhists, Australian aborigines, Native Americans, African tribes, of Islam and Hindu all hold versions of how the whole ball of wax came to be.

If all these disparate versions can somehow be divorced from faith and married to science with some sort of scientific credence, the result should be a very large and ponderous course of instruction with dozens of gods, goddesses, spirits and demons elbowing for positions of credibility. It would also begin to replace the questioning methods of science with the unquestioning rituals of faith.

It would mean to step back toward a time when the night was literally a curtain drawn over the face of a universe-centered sun, when a real Zeus hurled thunderbolts from Olympus, alchemists sought to make gold from lead, angels danced on the heads of pins and evil spirits lurked in our dark ignorance of the world.

Faith and science are not opposites. Faith is the very genesis of the scientific process. But the two are different.

Faith is the thing of emotion, the ethereal, the spirit; science is the thing of reason, the tangible, the hard and fast.

One is the enduring essence of the human soul. The other is the essential element of human knowledge. To mistake one for the other mars the beauty and the utility of both.

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