Tuesday, February 17, 2009

“God” is not "The Answer"

Take note that this article is not talking about any particular religion or things like that; I just borrowed the term “God” for easier explanation. The term “God” in this article refers to lots of things: Spirit, ghost, soul, angel, demon, and so on.

I was reading about string theory during my free time recently, and this phrase caught my attention:

God is not “The Answer”, but is a substitution for it until we found “The Right Answer”.

It makes me think a lot.

Let’s pick a few quick example: Ancient people does not understand about volcano, so they address it as the “Spirit of Fire”; ancient people does not understand about tsunami, thus they call it “Spirit of Water”, ancient people does not understand about tornado, instead they named it “Spirit of Wind”.

Religion comes from a period when humans were able to think and seek for information but had no way to explain what was happening around them, and religion was a way of explaining the things that could not be explained back then.

But now days, if people who saw a volcano erupts and shouted “The spirit of fire is angry!” I’m quite sure that person will eventually ended in Tanjung Rambutan (mental hospital). Similarly, people who saw eclipse and though of end of the world would be the laughing stock of the public.

So what can we conclude here is that, without the understanding of these natural phenomenon, we blame everything to the God; but with the knowledge of knowing how these things occur, and eventually predicting it, we can actually “Read the mind of God”, which is a famous phrase for Albert Einstein when he sought for the unification theory of all.

Thus in my opinion, instead of viewing God is the creator of all (which most religion stressed), I think that God is the knowledge itself. If we view at this point, science and religion can actually coexist together, where religion will be giving (temporary) explanations on things that science unable to explain currently, because human can be so stubborn about an answer, let it be real or fake.

Until today, there are still many things we couldn’t explain using science, questions such as the afterlife question, beginning of universe, beginning of humanity, end of earth, end of universe, and so on. We couldn’t answer these question, we often answer such question with “God knows” as the standard answer. But this doesn’t mean that “The Answer” doesn’t exist, is just that we are still seeking the answer, and will continue to seek the truth.

Seeking “The Answer” does not mean a betrayal to “God” (Galileo Galilei was burnt alive for revealing sun as the center of the solar system, instead of the earth), but instead it brings you closer to the God, better understanding to God, why God make things work in such way. I hate irresponsible answers such as “God has His way of thinking and it is what it is.”

Remember that chemistry was originated from alchemy; astronomy was originated from stargazing. The evolution continues on, it is all in our hand that we want to be a caveman that shouted “The thunder god is angry!” inside a cave; or the modern man who use solar power; or even the future human who build amazing spaceships and do galactic exploration to seeks “The Answer”.

The answer is clear, isn’t it? Yet, there are people who refuse, reject, and fear the evolution, how sad.

4 comments:

King said...

I think it's important that people accept criticism on religion, a lot of times I find that people use the "God works in mysterious ways" to justify just about everything, and they bring in the attitude that if you don't agree with me, your being anti-religion or what not.

If religion had it's way, we would probably be living in the dark ages, everything from your water supply to electricity to the computer keyboard and everything your using now came from the understanding of our world, which is basically science.

Anyway, I agree with your post, religion was from a period where humans were seeking for answers, and there weren't any answers to be found, that is probably where all the myths, legends, dragons, gargoyles and (sorry to say) religion comes from.

Philip Foon Weng Lian said...

This is the era of DNA-driven world and evolution is undeniable.

Dr. J Craig Venter
Father of Human Genome Project

Jian Akiraceo (Miao) said...

Some people just afraid of changes..

Lai Yeong King said...

Hahaha indeed guys, the worst thing is that the people who fear of evolution always uses religion as an excuse...

Sad la