Thursday, November 12, 2009

Me vs. Richard Dawkins

(Wonder what kinda traffic that title will generate!)

I don't have much of a beef with Atheist Richard Dawkins. I think most of religion is mumbo-jumbo. I have a rather positivist view of religion. First, humans needed religion to try to explain existence. Then they needed philosophy. Now, science.

The thing is though, I don't believe that science will ever explain it all. That's not to say that we should therefore blow the dust off of our holy books and turn to the deranged scribblings of various long-dead lunatics for guidance.

What science seems to do is explain more and more of our immediate experience, whilst also enlarging our sense of the vastness of the universe(s) we inhabit. Before the average person can get their mind around the atomic scale, we discover smaller and smaller sub-atomic phenomena. As we get used to galactic scales of vastness, we learn more and more how big the universe is and that it is one segment of an infinite multiverse.

What is behind all of this? We still don't know much more than our cave-dwelling ancestors. It's vast and it's bigger than us, and it's beyond us.

2 comments:

Real_PHV_Mentarch said...

Good point - as a scientist, I know there are questions out there that may never get to be answered.

However, reason and critical thinking still remain the best way to continue improving not only our knowledge and understanding of life and the universe, but also to improve ... ourselves as human beings.

Beats superstition, fear and ignorance any time, any day! ;-)

thwap said...

Egg-zak-a-lack-a-lack-a-lee!

The discoveries of science have made things even more grand.