A Short Look At The Liaison Between Science And Religion

By Ankit Varma:

“Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men”
                                                                                                                           -Jean Rostand

Science is the melting pot of curiosity, imagination and human endurance. The laws of the science played a pivotal role in unfolding the secrets of nature and understanding the working forces behind the miracles of nature. Our technological powers have given us control over almost all aspects of our life. It has changed the way we travel, talk and probably the way we think. Science is about data, logic and observation. It’s all about putting a method to the madness. Human mind doesn’t work this way, the inherent nature of the mind certainly is to be logical but at the same time there is no instrument which measures belief. Similarly the scientific community outright rejects the presence of god.

In my opinion god is a higher being, a force behind the universe. Gods’ divinity and presence are two very different things. The fact that god exists does not mean that it is necessarily a divine entity. For instance, there seems to be nothing ‘unscientific’ about existence of a human being called Ram. His divinity is a matter of faith and his heroics, a matter of belief. Every religion around the world is centred on life of such human beings with inhuman capabilities. But ironically these so called ‘unscientific assumptions’ continue to be a part of almost all the individuals of the earth. The reason for this is that religion is not all about holiness of a person or place, it is about the teachings of compassion and love which are the fundamentals of every religion. If a woman inspired by her god can sacrifice her whole to share the pain of the orphans and caring for the homeless, I don’t think we have any right to question the source of her inspiration.

We see with our eyes, feel through the skin and think with the brain. But who is the witness? Science disregards the presence of a soul, drawing a technical analogy- consider a computer, it is an assembly of electro-mechanical parts but is it what makes it a computer? In my opinion the presence of a human entity or popularly called the user is what gives complete sense to the computer. On similar lines an assembly of organic parts along with a soul makes us human beings. Soul is the witness.

Someone once said that science was brilliant at answering ‘how’ but becomes terribly confused when it is asked ‘why’. For instance, science is still discussing the origins of the life. It has been ‘concluded’ that the first cell was nothing but a mere coincidental collision between molecules in a pool of amino acid which resulted in DNA. Going further into pre-history, the event responsible for existence of that pool was the Big Bang. The universe in its earliest form was a point. So did the point just appear from nothing? If we discount the fact that god exists we come to the conclusion that everything came from noting. From the perspective of pure logic everything comes from something, so god is that something. So, as far as I’m concerned god is logic apart from being a matter of belief.