face to face

If someone were to ask me whether science and religion can coexist, my answer would be: ‘it does.’ Religion has always explored the realm of life in which we don’t know the answers – the things that touch us in ways that we find it hard to describe scientifically. I’m talking about creativity, compassion, paternal love, intimacy, evil. I could list more. There’s something extremely human about religion. We’re constantly overwhelmed by our emotions and it’s not easy for us to think rationally. After all, our intelligence is limited. Science, on the other hand, is not a religion. It’s a nice process for us humans to get to the bottom of things about the universe. As discussed in my post about the scientific method, science can only approach ideas that can be falsified. God’s existence is not, and never will be, one of these ideas. So, by definition, religion always lies outside the scope of science. However, this doesn’t mean that they never cross paths. A famous example is...

I have always been interested in science. I loved learning about how the world could be experimented on and, most of all, understood. It was only in my first year of university, studying a Bachelor of Science, that the philosophy of science was properly presented to me. Here, two major concepts I learnt laid the foundation for my change in worldview. Speaking of views. Photo by me. The first was the idea of e mpiricism . Scientific knowledge is gained through human experience. While doing experiments in my physics courses, I learnt that everything that is measured has uncertainty. A good example of this is simply measuring the length of a pencil with a ruler. You can use the ruler and read off a number, but the number you read depends on many things. Even if you do your best to read the number carefully, your measurement still relies on the precision of your ruler. The smallest markings my ruler has are millimetres. This means that, using my ruler, I can never know whether the p...