Reason, Science and Faith

Taking a Hebrew language course the last words written across the chalkboard before I left Theology School were Ha Ha Ha! Ha means ‘the’ in Hebrew and my student loan never arrived so I returned to the street and a car with a rusted out floor through which my feet could reach asphalt. Faith is not about quantification, science is. Reason is I think, useful for both.

I had left that car in the care of Sgt. Roy Benavidez, Medal of Honor winner, in El Campo Texas earlier that summer and rode a motorcycle home to Alaska. Now, without a motorcycle I drove the car to home passing through Utah and a close encounter with a spiritual experience. Faith in-the-world encounters experience while science tries to quantify it.

Science, politics and religion are three avenues for the experience of life. Life is an emergent phenomenon of entangled energy fields that seemed to be mass in-the-Higgs-field. We might trust that God has within his infinite and eternal nature all temporal Universes foreknown, even though they all pre-exist in an infinite variety of forms. One might also believe that a human spirit is a finite aspect of spirit. The Great Spirit being God is all being juxtaposing nothingness as a counterpoint and interval for anything that would seem to appear to have time. So what is one to think about science?

Mitochondrial D.N.A. transfers have been politically approved in England although it is still illegal to do so. Upgrading the mitochondria of a woman’s eggs with defective mitochondria might seem compassionate enough. A couple could have a hybrid baby I guess with three different genome contributions. That technology could also be applied to animals. Science could upgrade Siberian tigers to human level intellect with Bonobos and Chimps able to think as well as Republicans and Democrats becoming just a shout away. I suppose they have made Dolly the Sheep sort of creatures in secret. Maybe they made super-mice able to remember all of the passwords necessary to get food from very difficult maze caches as prototypes.

I think science today has a kind of hubris faith in atheism as truth. Because science materially works and has historically enlightened humanity in cosmology and other fields it isn’t uncommon to make the assumption that Biblical truth is obsolete. Those with degrees in science aren’t generally terribly philosophical or well read in Biblical history deeply enough to well-consider the perennial question of interest to philosopher. Even the brilliant mathematical cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said that “philosophy hasn’t kept up”. I think he means philosophers haven’t been doing the math of M-Theory, Emperor Theory and so forth. Generally he would be right about that, yet is it necessary for philosophers or theologians to work out the math of various cosmology theories to consider cosmology theories? Is a structure of a given multi-verse not something that can be represented theoretically with model logic or even a Cantorian abstraction of trans-finite sets within the Spirit?

Faith is about trust in things unseen. God is unseen except as The Son while science seeks to learn about the unseen and unknown through material avenues. Christians too hope to see The Son as scientists hope to find the final formula to whip up there own Universes out of nothing I guess.