Crazy idea, right? What does religion, or faith for that matter, has to do with science, you might ask? Granted, science is not usually concerned with matters of faith or God. Or, at least there isn’t a field of science that has made its business to study such things. The day may come, though.

However, science is very much concerned with the laws of nature. Scientists study natural phenomena without bias, and a thought is only accepted as fact if it has been backed with plenty of evidence. Now, what science calls nature or the physical world, a person of faith calls God’s creation. If you are a believer in God, you must accept that if it exists, God must have ‘put’ it there. So, if a scientist uncovers a bit of truth about the world we live in, he or she in fact uncovered something about God’s creation. Ergo, refuting science is refuting God, which one might say constitutes blasphemy.

Case in point: the evolution vs. creationism debate. Some people of faith believe that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. Science is convinced that it is at least several billion years old. They have come to that conclusion through gathering and evaluating evidence through many decades and the evidence seems overwhelming. The scientists were only interested in finding out what is and not to gather evidence against the existence of a god, and therefore we can safely conclude that bias wasn’t an issue.

There are several ways believers managed to cope with this contradiction. Some think that dinosaurs walked alongside man, others think that the fossils are false evidence and they were put there by God to test their faith and there are those who think that the theory of evolution is bogus. While all this might sound somewhat reasonable, a closer look at Bible will reveal that there is no direct mention in it regarding the age of creation. As a matter of fact, the estimate of 6,000 years comes from a monk who attempted to create a timeline of the universe based on the Bible. But, if you take the time to read the Holly Book, you will find that there are some points in that timeline where things get a little shaky. It can seem sometimes as if someone tried to bridge some large gaps in there, but stopped short of a complete rewrite. Things like that weren’t beyond the Church in the middle ages.

The problem isn’t that science and faith are completely different. If, in fact there is a God, science is bound to eventually stumble upon it. The problem is that, as a person of faith, you may have to reevaluate what you think is the Bible saying. The same thing happened when the idea of the Earth being the center of the universe or it being flat was blown out of the water by careful consideration of the evidence.

Bottom line: if you want to keep from committing the sin of blasphemy, you need to keep an open mind and resist entering into a tickling contest.

A lot of people believe that some of the questionable and even despicable behavior we see in human beings are things that animals are not capable of carrying out. One popular belief is that no animal will kill for fun. War is also thought to be the sole domain of Man.

Obviously these folks have never owned a cat or thrown an ant onto the anthill of another colony. Cats will hunt just for the sake of it, and when they catch a mouse they will keep playing with it until the poor thing is completely exhausted then they eat it. That’s a lot like humans doing their trophy hunting. I am only guessing here that there may be an evolutionary purpose in the cat’s behavior. The cat that hunts even when it is not necessary will be better equipped when it has to hunt to survive. A human being’s desire to do hunting for the sake of hunting could have the same root cause.

When it comes to war, we see social animals like ants being extremely prejudiced against not just other species of ants but also against their own. Again, there is an evolutionary purpose here. The stronger group of ants will annihilate the weaker one to satisfy the rule of “fittest survives.” It is crude and cruel by the standards of most humans, but it works. Ants have been around a long time. Man’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for conflict is usually attributed to wrangling for resources, but I wonder if this most rudimentary programming by nature to make the species stronger plays a role.

So, the problem here isn’t – it seems to me –that we act so differently from the other creatures of the Earth, but that despite our superior intellect and many extraordinary achievements we still act like them. We are no more than well dressed apes and talking monkeys.

Usually in Hollywood movies, the epic battle between evil and good is reduced to a skirmish between the devil (Satan, Lucifer or whatever you want to call it) and … some dude. Yeah, some shmo who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. God is only a vague idea; and, the main character is left to do all the representin’ by himself. This has always felt misguided to me. Even though, most of these movies have their basis in Christian mythology, they tend to fly in the face of some very basic information in the Bible.

Firstly, Christians - and more specifically evangelical Christians - tend to virtually ignore the Old Testament, it seems, and forget the God who took care of biz in Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis, the Lord punishes the wicked in these towns by destroying them both completely and killing everyone including people who are too young to commit sin. I like this part in the Bible, because it falls more in line with how the world seems to work. It is often theorized t that natural disasters and large accidents have their root in spiritual problems. They tend not to discriminate and affect everyone the same way regardless of age, gender or the like.

People also tend to forget that Satan (according to Christians, at least) used to be an angel of God. He might have fallen and may not be an angel anymore, but he is still God’s. If, in fact, it’s true that God is everywhere all the time, sees all and is all powerful then, surly, still very much reins over the devil itself. Sorry folks, that is just implied by the definition. So, when something truly evil takes place in the world such as famine or genocide, the devil maybe the contractor but God placed the job order.

Hinduism - to me - seems to have a better grasp of the concept. While the religion has lots of “lower level” celestial entities we refer to as “gods” they are the equivalent of Christianity’s angels, archangels and saints. They are powerful and maybe worth worshiping separately, but even to Indra, the king of gods, the Absolute is still a mystery. (Trust me when I say this, on closer look the distinction between the Creator, Sustainer and Destroyer is conceptual even if they have separate names for them. It is quite remarkable. I am planning to write an article about this phenomenon at some point.)

This “Absolute One” or God with a capital “g”, is not good or evil. It is simply “is.” Well, it is ultimately good, because the direction of the flow of Existence leads all of creation back to an absolute state where the fragmented pieces realize their true identity, which is being one with God. But in the mean time, God is there to maintain a balance between the constructive and destructive forces of the universe: good and evil. As a result, you experience miracles that make you weep and tragedies that, well… make you weep some more; and, it would be a mistake to think that they were NOT all the work of the “One and Only.”

One example would be the existence of planets outside of our solar system. It was only in 1997 that the first planet was discovered. There were two scientists - whose names escape me right now - who spent many years looking at the sky and insisting that there had to be some. Planets, I mean. They were ridiculed for their wicked ways. I know that because I saw one of them on the History Channel a while back; and, he looked visibly disturbed as he recalled what he had to go through for two decades prior to their discovery. I mean, silly them. Even before 1997, we knew that there were hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy and there were hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. We have known for centuries that there had been planets in our own solar system, so forgive these two bozos for doing the math! There had to be at least some planets out there.