It seems that humans are hardwired to make some sense of life or to have some meaning. Science and religion both agree on this goal, which is to come up with meaningful models to understand everything. These two spheres of human exploration fulfill our deepest longing to make sense of the world. The only difference is that science is more realistic and objective while religion is more imaginative and subjective.
While I am critical of traditional religions, it cannot be denied that these institutions have done a lot of good to humanity in providing meaning to countless souls throughout generations. It has assisted humanity’s search for a greater view of life and to provide moral directions. However, as societies develop and mature, there is a general trend to become less and less dependent on traditional religious notions and practices. Over time, human beings realized that although we somehow get a coherent and meaningful view of the universe through the lens of myth-based religions, true progress and survival of the human species cannot simply hinge on these dogmatic and closed-ended explanations. What we need is an objective yet dynamic understanding of the world around us.
While it is helpful to simply conjure that various phenomena are results of the activities of the gods, some wise men of old stood and dared to question these mythical and simplistic explanations. They dared to know nature objectively and break the shroud of mystery that surrounds them. Objective mechanistic explanations of common phenomena were made and their accuracy tested. Over the course of time, men of able minds learned that objective knowledge of the world is most beneficial to humanity, which should now be clear to the man in the street. We learned that we need to leave myths and imaginative explanations behind to sustain mental, material and even spiritual progress of mankind.
The general procedure of working out an objective view of the universe constitutes the very core of science. In this method, data from the external world are collected using objective measures with the use of conventional standards and instruments. In this way, the data can be clearly separated from the interpretation of the observer, which can often be swayed to certain biases as a result of personal preferences, cultural background and popular paradigms. While a scientist cannot be totally free from these, all inaccuracies resulting from these biases or from honest mistakes can still be corrected. In the scientific community, data and explanations are published, presented, criticized and revised or even abandoned. The evolution of this method and the community that actively uses and promotes it to advance the objective understanding of everything in the observable world perhaps constitutes the single greatest achievement of the human race.
Since then, the advance of science has been unstoppable. Historically, the development of science has caused religions to recede into unpopularity or to retreat to so-called “spiritual realm” as science is only supposed to concern with the physical and natural world. This is reflected in a simple line to make Galileo’s monumental discoveries compatible with religious ideas of the time – “The Bible shows us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”. This demarcation between physical and spiritual realms is of course purely arbitrary, which simply sets the bounds of where science is now but not a real limitation of scientific inquiry. As soon as science has not yet completed the grand project of coming up with an objective explanation of every observable phenomenon and as soon as myth-based or revelation-based religions can still fit scientific findings to their beliefs, these religious institutions will always be here to stay, doing the same good thing that it has been doing for millennia – providing meaning to billions of souls who instinctively resolve to make sense of their existence.
At the individual level, a choice has to be made on whether to commit oneself to a meaning of life that comes packaged and prescribed by any of the traditional religions or to adopt an open-ended meaning of existence guided by the objectivity of scientific inquiry.
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