What is Truth - Science vs Religion

     My mother died twelve years ago.  I was cleaning and discovered a book -  CHAOS AND HARMONY: Perspectives on Scientific Revolutions of the Twentieth Century by Trinh Xuan Thuan.  I never knew she had been reading or contemplating the subject. I would love to have shared late night conversations with her over the book.

     I made notations in the book as I read. A friend of mine read it and made notations as well. So I was able to enjoy conversing about what its ideas contained even though Mom had passed. My friend’s father always told her that at some point philosophy must turn to religion for answers to life’s big questions. There are times science must turn to religion as well because there are aspects of life that science cannot answer or measure empirically.  

     Earlier I mentioned Huston Smith, (Why Religion Matters) the comparative religion scholar. He writes that 
"Science cannot get its hands on:

1. Values
2. Meanings -Existential (what we find meaningful) and global (what is the meaning of life?) 
3. Final causes—the why of things –final causes outside the animate world
4. Invisibles—if there are invisibles that don’t impact matter, science gets no wind of them
5. Quality—the qualitative ingredient in values, meanings, purposes, non-inferable invisibles that gives them their power
6. Our superiors”

He tells us that “The religious sense - recognizes instinctively that the ultimate questions human beings ask (what is the meaning of existence; why is there pain and death; why in the end is life worth living; what is reality and what is its object)—are the defining essence of our humanity."

“If science cannot tell us what (if anything) is outside our universe, what can? Nothing definitively, but it would be foolish not to draw on every resource available.”

     The astrophysicist, Thuan, opens his book, CHAOS and HARMONY, with a chapter titled Truth and Beauty. He states that beauty in science or mathematics is when a theory is “inevitable, simple and congruent with the whole.”  In his closing pages he writes that science will never be able to decide between chance and a primary cause because as he shows in a discussion of quantum theory and the unsuccessful pursuits to formalize mathematical theory there are limits to reason.

    

“We will have to rely on other modes of knowledge, such as mystical or religious intuition, informed or enlightened by the discoveries of modern science.”