Dude, they have Carrot Top.
Yeat, but he’s their E.T.: the one that was so stupid he waddled back to the ship like a Weeble because he completely forgot he had the power of telekinetic flight!
Stranger
My personal experience with math and science was almost religious in and of itself. I had a good HS calculus teacher who, after many tedious weeks of series study, presented us with the principle of differentiation in a way that I saw as one might experience an epiphany. And years later, reading a Sci-Am article describing the events of a supernova in detail was such a story of elegance and beauty like unto a classic novel. I have not needed religion because the realm of understanding and theory fills and such need I might have had.
Everybody is typically unique, of course, ymmv.
The thing about science is that its horizon is ever-expanding. That is a good thing, because if we reached the end of discovery, what would we do next? Proper learning, as I see it, succeeds when you have not only grasped the concept but also come to the realization of how vast is the scope of your enduring ignorance about everything else. You can take that as motivation to explore further, or you can fill that unanswered space with the deity of your choice. I prefer the former, but if you prefer the latter, fine by me.
True. If the Universe is a puzzle or mystery to be solved, it’s a remarkably well-designed one, in the sense that it can be figured out, but not all at once. If you’re religiously inclined, you may see the hand of a Creator in that, though of course not everybody does.
If you’ve ever seen Star Trek, to find God scientifically is more like encountering an alien species than it would be a spiritual experience.
Say for example that we encounter the Space Whale, and discover that it ingests some extra-dimensional something that we can’t detect and outputs matter and anti-matter. And as we research, we determine that if a Space Whale ever died, the containment of matter and anti-matter in its digestion system would rupture explosively, to create a new universe. Subsequently, we determine that our own universe is clearly the result of a dying Space Whale.
Now, granted, that doesn’t tell us where Space Whales came from, but it still tells us what manner of creature created the universe. So…cool! But not spiritually meaningful.
The interesting thing will be if we can ever find something that doesn’t have a “turtles all the way down” component to it.
Even if we ever discovered a large bearded man in a toga, waving things into existence, or Space Whales, the question still becomes, “Well how did you come into being?”
But if you figure that even with the information that we currently have, it would seem that the Universe is simply a bunch of emergent structures that are the result of random interactions between particles so tiny that it’s almost comical to imagine that the macro-structures could possibly have been planned. If we assume, for example, that a quark is equivalent to a single cell in Conway’s game of life - which we know to be a random field operating with certain physical rules - and emergent structures that have the capability of persisting (to some extent), a human being would be like a glider with an area of 1.345x10^29 cells.
I can see how such a glider could form, spontaneously, but with such a vast remove from the underlying structure, it seems unlikely that a human (for example) was an intentional result. An intelligent creator would be more likely to use much simpler and more directly correlated building blocks - like cells or something even simpler - than quarks and emergent structures. The distance from the medium to the result certainly gives more opportunity for fiddling. But I’d be hard pressed to say that, that level of control is necessary if your primary concern is life forms.
I think this is right on the ball. The main thing that knowledge of science and math does is to expand the understanding of the universe away from the day to day world that we experience on a human scale into a richer more abstract view of reality. From this view the idea of a bearded god sitting on a throne in the sky, or heaven being a place with pearly gates and rivers literally flowing with milk and honey, seems simplistic and absurd. There Universe just doesn’t work that way. Far more reasonable would something like an abstract god that represents a sort of universal consciousness and an afterlife that involves the merging with that consciousness. God being more of a physical law than a person. In this way I don’t necessarily think that science will turn one away from organized religion to a more free form spirituality.
I’m a theist, but I think the simple answer is that, as was said upthread, for the most part science and theology are orthogonal. That’s not to say that one cannot inform the other; in fact, they often do, but one cannot replace the other. By this, I mean, science tells us the nature of the universe, the laws that govern them, as best as we can tell, but it doesn’t give any subjective explanation about why it is the way it is and not some other way or why it even exists at all. If, however, one believes in God, it can perhaps help one to understand the nature of God by evaluating creation. Similarly, for those who believe in God and seek to understand him, or even those who don’t but are simply fascinated by existence, can have that curiosity satisfied in many ways by learning about it.
The analogy I like to imagine is as if we see a painting. Science can tell us whether it’s on paper or canvas, what sort of paints were used, what colors they were, maybe discern patterns that allude to whether the paint was put there by hand, but brush, thrown, or perhaps purely accidental, it might even be able to give us some idea of what the subject matter is, a person or a scene or it’s just abstract. None of that tells us a thing about how it makes the observer feel, which in all likelihood is different from person to person, nor does it tell us what the artist intended to communicate. Or, it may not even be a person and could be an accident or generated by some other process, and thus any guesses at what it’s intent is are meaningless. However, the point is that it’s precisely how a painting makes us feel that encourages us to learn about the artist, his message and his technique and materials and it’s the technique and materials that help to convey that message. And, just as interestingly, if there is no artist, they still inform our own interpretation of the painting.
Hmm… that probably doesn’t work out so well written, but the point is, despite that they’re orthogonal concepts, our awe at creation combined with our knowledge of how it all works work together to create a more complete and meaningful experience in our understanding in a way that neither can alone. It’s very much the vastness and smallness of the universe, it’s precision and beauty that all drives me to learn more so I can have that much more understanding to be left in an even great state of awe. I think everyone, theist and atheist alike, share that same sort of experience, the only difference it seems is how they attribute that cause.
I’m not entirely sure about this. You might get an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics that might lead you toward believing in a designer with exquisite taste. And the fact that it’s such a powerful tool in describing reality while not necessarily being a part of it suggests something rather miraculous.
FYI, I’m an atheist and I don’t buy it. But it’s interesting to think about.
I’ll accept this as true…but would still reject theology as the way to approach the questions of understanding and emotional appreciation.
A painting, or many other aesthetic experience, has a deep emotional context. It gives us personal sensations of awe. That isn’t changed by the existence or non-existence of Zeus. We don’t need to invoke a non-human entity; we don’t need spirits to enrich the “spiritual.”
One guy looks at a sunset, and sees the glory of God. Another guy sees the might of Odin. Yet another guy might see the terror of Cthulhu, with hellish tentacles just waiting to reach up and pull the sun into the sea.
That’s just one of the problems with theology: there aren’t any limits on what can be imagined. There is no “theological method,” especially a method of falsifying incorrect speculations. (The church can reject certain speculations, decreeing them anathema, but they’re doing so by political mechanisms, not knowledge-based reasoning.)