New Examiner Article: “Science as a method of faith affirmation or spirituality.”3 min read

I have just posted a new article for the Milwaukee Examiner titled “Science as a method of faith affirmation or spirituality.“

Article

Consider science as a method of pursuing spirituality or affirming your faith no matter what your path – Christian, atheist, or something else. I alluded to this idea in my previous article titled “Do we have options in the religion vs science debate?” by saying that:

Scientists of all sorts have the job of trying to understand the very things that the hand of the creator has created – geologists, biologists, and psychologists to geneticists and quantum physicists. For some, their scientific study and exploration can be an awe inspiring and faith affirming exercise.

Science and religion are both pursuing truth – science in the physical world and religion in the metaphysical world. What more glorious and spiritual a journey can there be than to explore and understand the mechanics behind the wide variety of our seemingly miraculous existence? In exploring and understanding how living creatures and matter work you can find an awe and reverence for all of existence due to the inherent complexity and the delicate balance that is required to make life  possible: atoms, molecules, elements, proteins, DNA, RNA, synapses, electrical impulses, muscles, and nerves, to temperature, gravity, atmosphere, crystal lattice structures, strong and weak nuclear forces, chemical reactions, inverse square law, quantum entanglement, fusion and fission, and and the list goes on an on.

As science understands more and more about how everything works, it makes our existence even more implausible and so very small as the known universe gets larger and larger – in the billions of billions of universes and trillions of trillions of planets. New galaxies and cosmological discoveries are found each week as our technology allows us to peer farther and farther into deepest reaches of the cosmos putting the possibility that life existing on any single plant as being statistically improbable due to inappropriate conditions to support life as we know it. Perhaps all of this is helpful in reaffirming the belief in humanity’s favor with the creator, or perhaps reaffirming the glory of evolutionary happenstance and serendipity as the conditions happen to be just right for life as we know it to form on this insignificant little planet called Earth.

A very knowledgeable man, Dr. Hugh Ross, talks in a Youtube video series about Creation as a Science. I do not happen to agree with almost  everything he says (at least within the first 3 parts), but the evidence that he points out is exactly what I am talking about – how our knowledge of science and our existence is such an seemingly miraculous thing that it can be affirming of our faith. Many of these numerous reasons are pointed out in the his videos and on their his organization’s website: Reasons.org – a trinitarian faith-science organization.

Andrew Kerr, a speaker at my church, takes a more philosophical approach in two of his speeches to my congregation in 2007: Atheism as a Religious Affirmation and Cosmos: Suggestions for an Atheistic Religion. I have found his words an inspirational and thought provoking approach to possibility of spiritual atheism through science and the physical world.

Both point to, albeit from widely different angles, a similar idea – that the reverence brought on by the wonder and understanding of our what things all had to fall into place to make humanity’s existence possible can be a faith affirming or spiritual experience no matter what you spiritual or a-spiritual beliefs are.