religious essay

Both are necessary for the fullest understanding of

reality

"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. It is not necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary."

"I am astonished that the scientific picture of the world around me is so deficient. It gives a lot of factual information and puts our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, all that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity."

The Sense of the Mysterious “The most beautiful and deepest experience a human being can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is it is to be religious. In this sense, I am religious. To me, it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.”

Albert Einstein, 1932

“I was sitting by the ocean one late afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rock, water, and air around me is made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consist of particles which interact with one another…the earth’s atmosphere is continually bombarded by cosmic rays, showers of particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they penetrate the air—all this is familiar to me from my research in high energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams, and mathematical theories. As I sat on that beach, I ‘saw’ cascades of energy come down from outer space, in which particles are created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ‘saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and ‘heard’ its sound and I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of the Dancers worshipped by the Hindus,” Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, xv.

We belong to a cosmic creation of 13.8 Billion years

Grounded in planet Earth for 3.8 Billion years

 Sprung from an organic life chain that began 2 Billion years ago

Humans have been evolving for 7 Million years

Homo erectus, 1.5 million years ago

Homo sapiens sapiens, 200,000 years ago

From space, the aurora is a crown of light that circles each of Earth’s poles. This view of the aurora australis (southern lights) on September 11, 2005, four days after a record-setting solar flare sent plasma—ionized gas of protons and electrons—flying towards the Earth. The ring of light that the solar storm generated over Antarctica glows green in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, shown here. From the Earth’s surface, this appears as a curtain of lights.

Pre-Modernity: Dependency on external authority (Church, divine right of the king)

Movement from certainty of God certainty of/in the self (Descartes)

Modernity: The certainty of/in the self certainty of reason and science to describe reality

Self-dependency; mastery over nature

Postmodernity: Neither certainty nor central authority are organizing principle (center); all sources are subject to critique and interpretation (hermeneutics)

But neither is any source (including religion and theology) excluded outright

Ways of Relating Science and Theology 1. Conflict Model

 Biblical Literalism vs. Scientific Positivism

2. Independence Model

 Kant: each belongs in its own bucket

 Science and religion do different jobs; neither should be judged by the standards of the other

 Scientific Language is used for prediction and control

 Religious Language recommends a way of life, moral principles, is used in worship.

3. Inter- Dependence Model of Science and Theology

Religious questions arise at the horizons or limit-situations of human experience: e.g., anxiety, mortality, joy

In science, limit questions refer to ethical issues and presuppositions

Science and religion therefore complement each other (see Küng, 41).

Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862

Lived at Walden Pond in an effort to “live deliberately” --“to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”

Devoted to learning the natural history of his native woods and rivers; reading philosophy and the narratives of early explorers; discoursing with Emerson and his Transcendentalist friends, writing tracts against slavery and inventing the “nature essay”

John Muir (1838-1914)

Founded the Sierra Club

Helped establish the National Park system

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“The power of imagination makes us infinite”

The Western Veil Nebula, a.k.a. “Witch’s Broom,” is part of a huge supernova remnant that spans more than six moon widths (diameters) across the night sky.

“Openness to the whole of reality is required of human beings, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians…”

The more deeply human beings penetrate into space and matter, the more inscrutable, the more enigmatic, reality becomes

 “Cosmos” originally meant “order”  Then “decoration”

 Then “harmony”

 Today “cosmos” denotes the world as an ordered whole, cosmos rather than chaos.

Why does the universe exist? Why doesn’t it not exist? Why does it have the particular properties of consciousness—the human reflective capability?  Would the cosmos exist if no one was

there to perceive it?

What is real?

Reality is… Our universe: the macrocosm and the microcosm, matter and antimatter (every particle has an anti-particle, with which it can annihilate)  Our world and its history since the Big Bang

 Especially myself, spirit and body, disposition and behavior…

Hence, multifaceted, multidimensional  The “real” can occur in different ways. The same

reality differentiates depending on the perspective and interest of the observer

 There is never reality “in itself”

 Never absolutize a particular aspect of reality

 But neither can reality be split into 7 billion opinions: there must be a unity to reality: the truth of being

(see Küng, 32-34)

The Growing Recognition

Among believers that the world is intelligible and that its organization could be understood laid the foundation for modern science

Galileo’s (1564-1642) confidence that his observations displace the authority of the Bible was part of the paradigm shift from pre-modernity into modernity

Mathematics is the key to understanding the cosmos

The task of the scientist is to test mathematical theories against empirical observation

What kept terrestrial objects from flying off the earth as it traveled through space?

Realized that orbits aren’t circular but elliptical

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Using a new telescope he had constructed, he measured and tracked 4 tiny “stars” moving near Jupiter, which converted him to a heliocentric universe

“If scientific knowledge is certain and contradicts what the Bible says, a new interpretation of the Bible is due,” Galileo to the Benedictine monk B. Castelli, 1613

1633: the Catholic Church’s Inquisition formally condemns Galileo, who had proven Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolves around the sun.  Issac Newton confirmed Galileo’s

theories

The Beginning of the Rift Between

Science and Religion

Issac Newton (1643-1727)

Developed Calculus to explain his theories and laws. Voltaire said, “Calculus is the art of numbering and measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived”

Newton realized that both were necessary to understand and describe the laws of nature:

 Inductive Reasoning is based on Probability and

Inference: if you experience an event over and over, you will infer that given the same conditions, it will happen again in the same way

 David Hume and Empiricism

Deductive Reasoning is based on axioms or

theories, which lead to new conclusions

 Rene Descartes and Rationalism

1. Objects have inertia—resistance to changes in motion—so they remain in the state of motion they’re in unless a force acts on them.

The real effect of a force is to change the speed of an object

This isn’t obvious in the everyday world because there is always a force (such as friction) that slows down moving objects

2. The mass of an object determines the effect a force has on it

The body will accelerate (change its speed) at a rate proportional to the force. The greater the mass, the smaller the acceleration

3. Every action (force) has an equal and opposite reaction; a jet engine pushes out exhaust gas to get a push forward

But these laws are not accurate to describe what happens when things move at the speed of light or in strong gravitational fields: for this we need Einstein—the ultimate laws of motion

Gravity Attracts objects to each other

 Strength of attraction increases as mass increases, but an object has to get to planet-sized mass to have any influence on anything. This is why gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces

“Force” is a phenomenon in which energy is transferred from one object to another

The Classical Model in Science

Cause and effect: everything happens as a result of something that causes it to happen

Determinism: everything works in a predictable fashion

Wholes comprise a number of parts

Neat, efficient, comprehensible

All elements in the universe are stable, isolated and independent of one another, operating as a machine

Can be known independently of the observer

1. Knowledge of Objective Reality

That the world can be described as it is in itself, apart from the observer

Space and Time were absolutes: located independently of the observer’s frame of reference

2. Determinism: the future of any system of matter in motion could be predicted from accurately knowing its present state

3. Reductionism: behavior of the smallest parts reveals the behavior of the whole

Change consists in rearranging the parts which themselves remain unchanged

Nature is a law-abiding machine; God is the “watchmaker”

Electrons behave as both waves and particles

No sharp line can be drawn between the process of observation and what is observed

Indeterminancy is an objective feature of nature, not just a limitation of human knowledge

Contradicts Newtonian determinancy

The observer’s activity becomes part of the history of the atomic event

Free, independent quarks have never been observed; quarks are parts that cannot exist except in a larger whole

Einstein Special Relativity (1905)

The only constant in nature is the speed of light (186,000 mi/sec)

 Identical for all observers, however quickly they are moving relative to one another

All motion is relative, depending on where the observer is in relation to the moving object

Mass and Energy are equivalent at the speed of light squared:

They are two aspects of the same phenomenon

Energy is all there is; even matter/mass is a super-condensed form of energy

The energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass, making it harder to increase its speed. This is only significant for objects moving close to the speed of light (like the Millennium Falcon)

Watching an object approach light speed, you’d see it become heavier, contract in length and age more slowly. Time and space distort when approaching the speed of light

E=mc²

Beyond Newton

According to Newton, if you push an object, you put energy in to make it move faster: it gains kinetic energy of motion by increasing its velocity (acceleration equals force divided by mass)

But with Einstein, some of the energy you put in pushing an object goes into making it move faster, and some goes into making it heavier. Mass and Energy are equivalent and interchangeable

Einstein realized:

1. There are no instantaneous interactions in nature.

2. Therefore there must be a maximum possible speed of interaction.

3. The maximum possible speed of interaction is the speed of the electromagnetic interaction.

4. The speed of the electromagnetic interaction is the speed of light.

5. The speed of light is the maximum possible speed.

Any measurement of time uses the idea of simultaneous events, such as the arrival of a train and the measurement of a clock.

Simultaneous events in one frame of reference would not necessarily be simultaneous when viewed from a different frame. “Relativity of Simultaneity”

Time Time is relative; passes slower or faster depending on the speed at which something travels

Called “Time Dilation”

Light is the ultimate clock: in any frame of reference, with light from any source in the universe, we can measure how long it takes to cover a certain distance and work out how much time has passed

Muons, created by the collision of protons from cosmic radiation and air molecules, travel at 99% the speed of light

Life span is 2 millionths of a second

How do they survive long enough to make it from the upper atmosphere to Earth’s surface?

Time slows down for muons travelling at near light speed

Lab-generated Muons cannot travel as fast

Verifications of Time Dilation

Classical Mechanics Assumes:

1.The time interval between events is independent of the observer

2.The space interval (length) of a body is independent of the motion of the observer

Einstein shows:

The speed of light is constant and space and time intervals are relative

Challenging the Classical

Model in Physics

General Relativity (1915)

The framework of special relativity is extended to include gravity (the mutual attraction of all massive bodies)

Gravity has the effect of curving space-time  This means that 3-D geometry (H, L, W) can no longer

measure and describe space; time is added as the 4th

dimension

 The curvature of space depends on the amount of mass in an object

 Anything with gravity or mass warps space-time, creating a gravitational field, which has an effect on any matter travelling through it

 All objects move and interact relative to the curved nature of space-time

When you’re in a high-speed elevator… Accelerating upward,

you feel heavier, pressed to the floor

Decelerating, you feel light and rise upward

The Problem of God Day One.pdf