Wednesday, July 04, 2007

faith and science

How faith and science view the world.

Science and rationality are based on one type of "observation" which may be faulty, and which can be misconstrued or misinterpretated through limited knowledge of how natural laws work.

Faith is based on a different kind of observation which says there are laws at work that may not be known. How then can one judge all that is, when one is utterly ignorant of everything?

A rationalist might say that God doesn't exist because he does not see God and sees no proof of God.

A person of faith might say. Because the rationalist doesn't see God where he happens to be in the whole universe doesn't mean that God does not exist elsewhere (One cannot prove a negative) or that God did not at one time exist or that God will not one day exist in the future. Thus, a person of faith allows for new knowledge without closing himself in inside five puny senses. The person of faith believes that there is a sixth sense which shows other knowledge that the five senses cannot find. The person of faith also believes that the universe works by many laws. Many of these laws are waiting to be discovered. One cannot judge an entire universe when one is only knowledgeable about a few of these laws.

For instance, from the beginning of time humans had a feeling that gravity existed. Newton named it, but it had existed before. Humans also had a vague idea about the law of Physics but Einstein had to examine and puzzle it out. People knew that things fell down, they knew they could run (or outrun each other) and then lose steam. Even a little school kid knows by irrational instinct how long it takes to cross the road before the upcoming car hits him. But there was no rational science behind these things until the scientists puzzled it out.

Once these laws were puzzled out, then the idea of the law of thrust came about. And humans could see that there was another law that could be worked in opposition to gravity. Science then is rational, but it is only rational as far as it discovers what the irrational human heart had already surmised.

Let us not forget that Albert Einstein was a theist, as is Stephen Hawking.

The idea of creation only states that there is a creator, that there is some being (inorganic, and non-biological) greater than uncaused Causer of all things who is mind and who because he is so much greater and so much more different than we are, cannot be wholly comprehended by rational thought. It is as if an ant in the middle of the desert, with his limited eyesight were to tell me there is no such thing as an ocean because he has never seen one. Where does an ocean begin to explain himself to the rational mind of an ant?
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