Religion or Reality

The Beginning of His-story

 "Analogies prove nothing, but they can make us feel more at home."

-Sigmund Freud

Every religion comes packaged with its own story of creation, and science is no different. However, rather than using Genesis as source material like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, science has its own unique origin story for the universe: the Big Bang Theory. This theory is an important part of a larger collection of theories describing the reality of science, known as the Standard Model. We'll get into the details of it soon enough, but I think it's interesting to note that science takes the humanity out of its explanations of reality. While other religions use deities who share human qualities to depict the workings of the universe, like God using human words to create things or angels delivering messages to humans - science takes a more abstract approach. There are no deities, just things. Matter, to be precise. People have a hard time with abstract concepts, that's why religious texts are riddled with metaphors and analogies; they aid understanding.

To demonstrate my point, let's review the creation of light. According to Genesis, God said "Let there be light", and there was light (Genesis 1:3). It's simple, it's to the point, and it's hard to get confused about what's happening. Compare that to the version found in the Standard Model. In his book, You Are Here, Christopher Potter presents a beautiful illustration of theory according to science. In chapter 7, he begins describing the first moments after the Big Bang. In that initial harsh environment, tiny particles known as electrons and protons were repeatedly annihilated, creating photons that, once the universe cooled, were able to unite into streams of light. I paraphrased a bit, because the original explanation was teeming with crazy quantum mechanics talk like quarks this and gluons that, but you get the point. There are no deities presented to easily create the light with words or magic. Instead, we are given strange terms that are meant to represent the smallest pieces of matter that we believe exist.

There's that word again. Matter. Don't worry, we'll get to it.

I expect on the surface you can recognize the advantages the Biblical story has over the scientific one, because you're more likely to grasp the concept. But as history has proven, taking the time to understand a topic on a deeper level can lead to some awesome outcomes. In other words, when we dissect the different aspects of reality, we can create fun stuff like light bulbs and computers. And yes, light bulbs are just as fun as computers. If you disagree, don't use them, and tell me how much fun the dark is. Thank God for Edison, he really did humanity a service with that one. Or was it Tesla? Who knows? That's a conspiracy for a different book.

Anyways, this interest in the abstract is actually quite an old fascination. The Greeks, who were rather active before the time of Jesus, were all about learning and developing the abstract business. But they had one problem - they didn't rule the world long enough to change the rules. The Christians, on the other hand, did. They ruled long enough to actually kill people for claiming things that went against their doctrine. Hello Spanish Inquisition, how would like your stake? If you were smart enough to conclude that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around, like Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, then you were killed. Okay, neither of them were killed, just arrested, but people were burned at the stake for other crimes against the church, like Giordano Bruno, who was burned because he thought the universe was a manifestation of God instead of God's creation, and Lucilio Vanini, who was burned because he didn't believe in God at all.

Needless to say, you probably didn't want to live in the old Christian world if you weren't the right kind of Christian. Luckily, science isn't like that. Defying the theories of science has never condemned anyone to death. At worst, skeptics are seen as foolish, and at best, science agrees and changes its theories. In fact, this is probably the coolest thing about science; criticism is welcomed. While the old church responded to criticism by rationalizing how they could not possibly be wrong, science responds to criticism by trying to find out who's actually right. Because of this compromising nature, followers of science are not driven to lose their faith if a theory is proven wrong. Finding errors simply means that there is more research to be done.