I will start with a problem: “A young man, brought up in a religious family, studies at a university, and as a result he comes to doubt – and perhaps later to disbelieve in – his father’s god� Here I see the big split between science and religion. Since over time, metaphysical aspects of religion have been proven wrong, any student will start to doubt. He sees that not everything he was taught in religion can been proven by science, and as a result the young man starts to doubt God. The Catch 22 is that he has been taught that to believe in God one must not doubt anything about God.
As a young adult, I have begun to learn that the world is larger and more complex then ever thought before. Out side sources start to challenge my faith and its metaphysical aspects, since I started to gain a little bit of knowledge. Keeping along those lines, I am now open minded to different ideas, even ones that show signs of doubt in God. This is all being taught to me by brilliant people, along with peers and others I encounter in life. It’s coming out that many assumptions I made about the world and its take on my religious views, were wrong. So I now have to deal with a logical bombardment on my religion and its metaphysical aspects. As a student, when facts are questioned or wrong, doubt is created. I feel like my religious beliefs are now flawed because I cannot have belief in God’s existences as an absolute truth. I essence, I have lost faith.
Like the young man mentioned in the Feynman’s essay, I also had similar struggles in my beliefs in God. Feynman outlines the relationship between the belief in God and the facts of science, in a way that I can relate to. The metaphysical aspect of my religion was a large part of my life and how I believed the world was. I began to see problems in the metaphysical aspects, where science was not able to back stories I learned from my religion and sometimes even challenged them. As a student, I was having a harder time grasping the concept of God, since I was now away from a faith based environment, and in a more logical, opened minded environment.
I started having doubts in God when I started questioning the metaphysical ability of God to hear individual prayer. How could one person, or thing, hear all the pleas and prayers from everyone, everywhere, all at once? In a logical sense, I get lost at the thought that something could be that all-inclusive on such a large scale. My faith taught me to just believe that God is all knowing and all powerful and hears my every prayer. This shows me my religion works somewhat, off of blind faith. Best example is I believe something just because I was told it by the church. With something as large and as complex as prayer, you have to completely look past the logical aspect of the facts to believe in it. As a student, I have found it harder and harder to look past facts I have been shown. But if my faith is shattered by just one finding or one fact then I really never had a faith in the first place.
I looked towards another large aspect of my religious belief, the creation story. After reading Darwin’s essay over his findings about evolutions and natural selection, I had to critical look at my belief of the creation story. Darwin’s theory shows how creatures have adapted to their environments, everywhere in the world, due to evolution, and how death of a non-adapted or the weakest creature, was just natural selection. Most of the theory was based off slow genetic evolutions to best suit environment, and survival of the fittest. As a student, this all makes sense on a logical base, but it challenges what my faith as taught me. Religion taught me that the creation of the earth and everything on it was a 7 day process, where God rests on the 7th day.
With creation, I have found a theory that bridges the gap between science and religion on the bible’s story of creation. A basic synopsis of the writing is that there is a “universal time� that is actually much slower then our “earth time�. The Essay stressed the importance of how they determined this universal time and how it was a big support for this theory. This universal helps time bridge the science religion gap. It helps by breaking down of evolution and creation on the same page. Using this universal time, they compared our fossil records and what science knew about the earth, with the Christian creation theory. It shows connections with the 7 days the bible said the world was created in and when life shows up even when man shows up, down to the hour in this universal time. It even goes along with the bibles theory that we are still in the 7th day, the day the bible says God rested. As a student, this helps me regain faith in some metaphysical aspects of my religion.
Now something else that pulls me towards faith and religion is what I believe my morals, and basic ethics of society, are heavily influenced by religion but not by science. This catches my eye for one reason; it shows that a religion offers answers to questions that science can never answer. Morals are not a something you can put into an equation or break down with numbers. Morals tell you what to do in situations, where science can only show you the cause and effect, but has no way to tell you how to judge the value of the result.
This also goes into a human psychology question; if humans are predominately good or bad in nature. Someone who would believes that humans are predominately bad in nature, might argue that religion or moral guidance is a must in societies for them to prosper in a positive way. I group positive into loving, caring and belief for the betterment for you and your fellow persons. It also, can be argued that humans are predominately good in nature to one another, on the base that they have a certain amount of expectation that everyone else feels the same and want to be treated the same. They could say this is a root to the belief in the golden rule, treat others as you would want to be treated. This person might come to the understanding that religion has help guild, but does not have full credit for the shaping of the morals in modern or past society.
I feel religion has distant but strong support in physical aspects. The size and sheer complexity of the universes is too much to believe it is random. There are a number of variables that are constants in nature that make me believe this. These are very important to us because it was literally makes the world go round on an atomic level. If just one of these were off nothing would work and we would not be here now. An example is how every thing found is made of the same basic building blocks, atoms. How atoms have charges that are constant, how their protons and neutrons keep perfect spacing, rhythm, and how every single atom does the same without a flaw. Any scientist will tell you that you have to control the variables in an experiment to make it work. So for all of what goes on in the world or universe just to be random and for nothing to have helped stabilize it to be what it is now, is hard for me to believe.
I enjoy the opinion of brilliant minds, especially Einstein, one of the most brilliant scientists of our age. He expressed a belief about God that best describes how I feel science should coincide with religion. He uses to walk from his office to his home, on the way he always walked though the chapel on the campus. Sometimes just passing, sometimes to stop and listen to someone reading or teaching. This led Einstein, in the later years of his life, to have many discussions with the pastors at the university. One profound thing that stuck out to me was what he said his beliefs in god were. In essence, he said he did not know if there was, what religion called, a God. But that, he knew that there was something greater out there.
.:l[Tyler]l:.
