What is all this Stuff about Science and Religion?

I have been fascinated by science and religion from childhood due to the fact that my parents exposed me to a religious environment at home and encouraged me to study science at school. To a casual observer, science and religion may seem to be poles apart from each other, but as a child I did not see a serious contradiction between them. I remember once I wrote an article in school magazine to express the opinion that science does not promote atheism as it does not deny existence of God; it just does not have any conclusive information about Him, so at best we can say that science is silent about the existence of God. Similarly religion does not ask you to adopt anti-scientific temper and negate science. The conflict between them is our own creation, and they can easily co-exist in harmony.

At that age I had very little knowledge and experience about either of them. As the years went by, I got an opportunity to learn more and experience them more closely. So, armed with much more information, I will attempt to write part two of that article in this post today.

No doubt science has made remarkable progress in a short span of time. We discovered the laws of nature from sub-atomic to cosmic level, and gave precise explanations for many naturally occurring phenomena. We managed to understand the matter around us in great details. All elements and their properties have been classified and composition of matter has been studied thoroughly. We also learned to put this knowledge to good use. We used it to tame natural forces like fire, wind, rain, and weather and exercise more control on our environment to have light, heat, and fire at our disposal. We created machines that can do amazing amount of work. We learned to generate and transmit electricity that changed our lives forever. We took it a step forward with spectacular advances in the field of electronics. I may go on and on.

The credit for this rapid progress goes to the numerous people who toiled tirelessly in their pursuit of knowledge. The essential scientific method was also a key ingredient behind this remarkable progress. When you follow scientific method, you do not accept anything blindly, but use the following steps:

• Observe the behavior and properties. Ensure you are objective in your observation and it is repeatable by others
• Explain it in terms of an underlying principle. Use existing knowledge and develop new theories to explain the observation.
• Verify the hypothesis through experiments and repeat it till it is confirmed. The experiments should also be reproducible by others.
• Apply the new knowledge gainfully to benefit from it.

Very impressive indeed, but scientific knowledge has its limitations. It is confined to the things that are well defined through theories and verified with experiments. In essence, science operates on a territory that is clearly mapped. The knowledge is precise, but it barely manages to scratch the surface and leaves a vast area that is not yet understood. There are many questions that science has not been able to answer so far:

• Is there a God? What is his form and what is his role in creation and running of the universe?
• What gives life to our body and what causes death? Is there something like soul that is an essential part of every living being? If yes, what are its properties?
• What happens to the soul after death? Do re-births take place? What happens between two births? Can we come back as a different creature in next birth?
• Do we get natural justice for our good or bad deeds? How?

This void is filled by religion. Most religions have answers to these questions and a vast amount of information about everything else under the Sun. Its coverage is extensive and we tend to accept it mostly on faith and without validating it experimentally. There are inherent risks in using this belief based system as a source of knowledge:

• We get contradictory views about the same question from different religions. We are not sure which one to take as correct or if there is a correct view at all. The reality may be that all the religions are correct – each of them forming a part of the whole picture. So it is not any one or the other, but the sum total of all the views that may point to the whole truth.
• As the religious knowledge base got passed through the generation, it is likely that many distortions have found their way into it and today it is hard to tell the original content from the distortions. 
• Unscrupulous elements have sprung up in every religion who take unfair advantage of implicit faith of people. They leverage blind faith to promote superstitions, making people irrational, fearful, and low in self-confidence.

Given this scenario is it safe to bank on the religious knowledge base available to us today? It’s a tradeoff you have to make. If you want to benefit from this vast repository of wisdom passed on to you by your forefathers, you need to be ready to accept the risk that goes with it. I personally believe that we should not shy away from it just because of the risks involved. It is possible to mitigate this risk with some effort. Here are some suggestions that I found useful based on my own experience:

• Use scientific methods to learn and understand religion. Take time to study scriptures of different religions yourself and use your judgment to spot and remove the possible distortions. Extract the essence of every religion that you study and form a whole picture in your mind.
• Do not just accept any suggestion blindly. Experiment and experience the benefit of a practice yourself before adopting it. For example, test the power of prayer yourself and see if it works for you before you believe it. Try out meditation yourself to know what it can do for you.

You may ask, "Prayer and meditation are fine. But how can I experiment with more involved concepts like soul or God? No one has even seen them?" The answer is simple. Have you seen air or gravity? No, you just experience them, and use the experience as a proof of their existence. In the same way most of us have also experienced God or soul at some point in our life. Think carefully, can you say with confidence that you have never experienced it yourself?

So, it seems there is no real conflict between science and religion, but the two are complementary to each other. Both science and religion help us tremendously to understand the universe around us. Imagine them lying on two ends of a continuum of knowledge. Science covers the fully mapped territory in a precise way and religion provides a basis to understand the rest of the territory that is still unmapped. Its method may be more faith based and somewhat imprecise, but its coverage is infinite. If they leverage each other, science can benefit by using the vast knowledge base available in religion at least as a rough map of the territory to be explored, and religion can benefit by scientific method of study to bring in more objectivity in it.