By and large, if you ask most people what they hang their hat on at the end of the day, it comes down to one of two things: religion or science. Some people do embrace both, but one tends to be more ascendant over the other. Both are thought to be concerned with answering the fundamental questions of existence, albeit utilizing different methodologies.
As I wrote last evening in "Hell, If I know", religion seeks to provide answers via elaborate fairy tales, fables and myths. Throughout the centuries, different civilizations and cultures have told different stories to fill in the wide chasm between what we think we know and what we think we don't know. Unfortunately, many of the supposedly iron core answers that religion seeks to provide tend to fall far short of the mark. Even among the most faithful, some fundamental questions continue to dog us every step of the way.
For those who view religion as offering unacceptable or even made-up answers, science is extolled as the best discipline to discover the truth about the concepts of life. Science, we are told, seeks to provide answers that can be empirically proven and replicated.
If we think about it though, science isn't really about answers at all; it's bread and butter aim is questions. While ephemeral answers DO pop up as part of its methodology, they are never the main focus.
Every time a scientist provides one of these temporal answers, what does it immediately spawn? Questions! Many questions. More questions that we can shake a stick at. So, folks set about to find placeholder answers to these many questions which, of course, generates even more questions. Try as we might, we can't escape them!
Because of this infernal yin and yang, science will never be able to answer the most fundamental queries. We will never arrive at the destination of "Oh, so that answers it once and for all." The best science can do is to make us believe that the basic questions have ultimate answers and, if we try hard enough, we can find them.
This represents the same fallacy that religion offers -- the very idea that we finite beings can grasp the infinite. As Chen Jen might say, in the void, there are no questions to be answered.
As I wrote last evening in "Hell, If I know", religion seeks to provide answers via elaborate fairy tales, fables and myths. Throughout the centuries, different civilizations and cultures have told different stories to fill in the wide chasm between what we think we know and what we think we don't know. Unfortunately, many of the supposedly iron core answers that religion seeks to provide tend to fall far short of the mark. Even among the most faithful, some fundamental questions continue to dog us every step of the way.
For those who view religion as offering unacceptable or even made-up answers, science is extolled as the best discipline to discover the truth about the concepts of life. Science, we are told, seeks to provide answers that can be empirically proven and replicated.
If we think about it though, science isn't really about answers at all; it's bread and butter aim is questions. While ephemeral answers DO pop up as part of its methodology, they are never the main focus.
Every time a scientist provides one of these temporal answers, what does it immediately spawn? Questions! Many questions. More questions that we can shake a stick at. So, folks set about to find placeholder answers to these many questions which, of course, generates even more questions. Try as we might, we can't escape them!
Because of this infernal yin and yang, science will never be able to answer the most fundamental queries. We will never arrive at the destination of "Oh, so that answers it once and for all." The best science can do is to make us believe that the basic questions have ultimate answers and, if we try hard enough, we can find them.
This represents the same fallacy that religion offers -- the very idea that we finite beings can grasp the infinite. As Chen Jen might say, in the void, there are no questions to be answered.
That infernal yin and yang...
ReplyDeletePeople forget that science is a method. It never answers the questions that religion considers:
Where did we come from, what are we supposed to do while we're here, and what happens when we leave(die).
But fairy tales, fables and myths...metaphors...may lead to understanding --meaning -- that science fails to deliver.
I think "religion" and "science" at their deepest levels (not at the superficial level of fossils vs. scripture) are the yin and yang of understanding. I guess I embrace both.
Je ne sais pas, wo bu zhidao.