I. Knowledge and Reunion.
- Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
—Genesis 3:7
Science and religion have been at odds for centuries, but why are they still in conflict? Why hasn't one won already? Could it be that they each hold what the other desperately needs?
Science has allowed man to peer into the deepest workings of the universe and to do things we never imagined. The usual school lesson is that we now know how things work, and that the quaint myths of primitive cultures lay bare the fact that they did not know any better. We hold our rational mindset to be absolute and inerrant, our technological society being evidence of intellectual supremacy.
Why then do these old myths still captivate the minds of most people?
The problem lies in the opposing philosophies that underlie the two bodies of knowledge. Modern science has historically built on the ontological theory of realism or materialism—the belief that reality is entirely physical and it exists independently of life—while religions are all based on what has been termed mentalism, idealism, panpsychism, etc—the belief that reality is primarily non-physical, the basic substance of the universe then being the soul, spirit, or mind.
While materialism is not a necessary component of scientific knowledge or methodology, is incompatible with religious or spiritual knowledge. Thus if there is any quarrel between the religious and the scientific, it is this ancient philosophical debate about the nature of reality.
The question is a muddy one: what is reality, mind or matter? Are we a purposive force or just dust and water? The dichotomy hints to no easy answer as the two extremes seem to be inescapable facts of our experience, hence the two birthing hypotheses of our protagonists.
Religion is "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs" ("Religion").
Religion declares an overarching law responsible for human life and everything in existence; the meta-physical source of our being from which we can derive guidance and counsel through the intricacies of our personal experience.
Monotheism is the consummation of the mystical mentality responsible for all the myths of our ancestors: from spirits to gods to God, the spiritual belief in more than matter evolved into the story of Oneness that has not left the human mind since. It has been a source of meaning, answers, and strength for humanity for several thousand years.
But Man was more curious than that. If we were all brothers and sisters and everything was for ultimate good, why was there still war, famine, slavery, disease? We still had problems and questions, and the struggle for survival meant a fight for knowledge. Human reason still had plenty of patterns to decode and the ongoing observation of the cosmos and our selves culminated with the distillation of our very decoding process.
The scientific method offers a systematic procedure for finding a question, postulating an answer, and testing for validity, producing what we now know as science: "a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws" ("Science"). Science generates explanations about our observations; it is an ever-growing collection of patterns and relationships that allows us to apprehend and navigate our world.
The discoveries of the scientific method revolutionized our understanding of the universe as well as our daily lives; it was clear that in matter was where the answers lay. Ignorance and superstition forever exposed by this new approach—the method—philosophical materialism would soon deliver its final verdict, the new overarching law, the Theory of Everything.
Not exactly. The search for a physical theory to answer all questions ran into a stone wall in 1931 with the publication of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which show that any mathematical system is self-referencing and thus inconsistent or incomplete ("Gödel").
The hopes for a unified theory in our hardest of hard sciences vaporized with our increasing observation of the universe, and reality now consisted more and more of genocide, slavery, torture, war, addiction, corruption, disease, moral degradation, economic ruin, and an existential void unlike anything man had ever seen.
What happened?
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