Die Primäre Tugend

Occasionally I am party to discussions where somebody points out that modern science, especially physics, contradicts faith and belief. That, of course, is far away from the truth. In the opposite: the more modern science becomes, the better the system of “knowledge” and of “belief” fit together.

The world view of the 19th century with its deterministic and reductionist approach left little to no room for God. Of course, one could think of Him as somebody who created the world. However, once set in motion the 19th century world needed no further supervision or intervention by God. Because time and space were absolute and forever it was even hard to imagine where God could “hide”.

20th and early 21st century science, however, are different. With their relativistic and holistic approach fueled by the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics they leave far more room for metaphysical and theological speculation. They are even able to explain what God, if He exists, would look like and “where” He would be; they even tell us that we have no way of understanding God or interacting directly with him on his level of existence (the latter being a basic assumption about the nature of God in most religions):

(…) He is omnipresent and omnitemporal – this is the abstract, four-dimensional space-time description of all points of view. But no human can ever see this. We are always in space-time.
(Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar in “Who’s afraid of Schrödinger’s Cat?”, chapter “Special Relativity”)

However, modern science does not tell us whether or not there actually is (a) God; it probably never will. But this is exactly where the fundamental distinction between knowledge and belief comes into play: both systems tell us, that we will never know, but have to believe.

What faithful people will of course find repellent is the picture of God that we see here. He is nobody who acts as a moral leader of his people, in a deeper sense He actually has no people. He is a very distant, very abstract, very far away person (if a person at all). He does not deal with “worldly affairs” as we know them. He is nobody who created “man after His image”.

And that, of course, it what people dislike: not the picture of God that modern science gives us, but the picture of man. We are nothing special, nothing God-like. We are just a very complex, very interesting form of existence. But we are not “choosen”.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2005 at 9:10 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.