More on science, religion …and ‘enlightened atheists’
Ref: “Science deals with the natural world, religion with the supernatural”, Letters, October 8.
William Page is right that science and religion deal with different aspects of human existence, and this explains why many scientists do not see a conflict between their professions and their beliefs. They just do not cross in their everyday lives.
For centuries, “natural science” was one of the areas of religious inquiry and it’s only recently that some people
started claiming that “natural science” can explain all other areas of human knowledge and religion itself, too. This position, known as “scientism”, is far from universally accepted and not just on religious but also on philosophical grounds.
We all understand the difficulties in bridging the Bible’s explanation of creation and our present scientific knowledge of the world. There is, however, an ancient Indian school of Sankhya that details creation of “matter” from “spirit” step by step.
It was traditionally used as a theoretical foundation for the practice of yoga, which reversed the process to bring us back from “matter” to the level of “spirit”.
On compatibility of this old school with modern knowledge, I would recommend a book, “Mystic Universe: An Introduction to Vedic Cosmology”, which uses Sankhya to explain both the Vedic idea of cosmos and our present understanding of what the universe is.
The Kindle edition is less than Bt200 on Amazon.
The Catholic Church runs the Pontifical Academy of Science, which lists almost 50 Nobel Prize winners among its members, which is another argument to my original point that conflict between science and religion exists mostly in atheists’ heads.
My other point was that these newly enlightened atheists are often quite aggressive in their desire to make the rest of the world comply with their views.
Stan G
Bangkok
