Jesus v. Heisenberg

Kaleidoscopic Inspiration in Notre Dame.  trefpool.com

For those of you who may not know, I am a science teacher.  I work at a school with some religious affiliations, and for the last two years, I've offered a seminar that explored a tension point that divides our society and inspires a colorful collection epithets lobbed between the two camps:

Science vs. Religion.

Most people begin this conversation by advocating for the truth and importance of one of the contenders, which misses the point entirely.  The ideological conflict between these two institutions remains unresolved for most because neither side accepts the basic arguments made by other - there's no way to begin the conversation.  This is happening because people want to start their conversations in the middle, rather than at the beginning.

HERE is where the conversation begins: Science and Religion are both epistemological lenses - ways take the information around you and filter it into an interpretation of what the world really "is".  They have some important things in common, and some very important differences.

What could science and religion possibly share, you might ask? Most crucially, both are based on assumptions that can never be proven to be true.  Everything you've ever seen has been filtered through your eyes.  Everything you've ever heard has been filtered through your ears.  You have no way of verifying whether or not the images you see in front of you correspond to some kind of objective reality that actually exists.  Neither does anyone else - assuming other people actually do exist.  You don't know if you're plugged into the Matrix, or just a figment in the imagination of God.

This is a millennia-old philosophical quandary known as solipsism - the idea that we can't know what

Jesus power.  trefpool.com

is "real" because we can never look at reality from the outside, so to speak.  There is even a mathematical basis for solipsism: Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates quite clearly that it is mathematically impossible to build a coherent, logical system without starting from basic, unprovable assumptions.  We glaze over these assumptions in our everyday lives because they're convenient, but convenience isn't the same thing as truth.

Did you hear that, militant atheists that belittle religious people for believing things?  Whether or not you realized it, your entire worldview is based on fundamental assumptions about the Universe that you will never, ever be able to prove, any more than a religious person can prove the existence of God.  We're all taking it on faith.  We all just believe whatever feels the most true to us.

Just some food for thought.